AGRICULTURE

James R. Lehning

Agriculture has until the last two centuries occupied most of the population of Europe, and this has made it a topic of major significance for social historians of virtually every historical period. Its study has required the use of a variety of primary sources, such as leases, registers of feudal obligations, notarial archives, landholding records, inquiries into rural conditions, and records from markets for agricultural goods. Historians of medieval and early modern societies see agriculture as the principal source of subsistence and wealth, providing the basis for human existence. It also served as a determinant of social and political relations in society, with institutions such as the family and local community organized around exploitation of the land. Political institutions were also organized to extract surpluses produced by agriculture to support other activities, such as warfare and religion. Agricultural production also is viewed as an important constraint on the possibilities of economic, social, and political transformation. While social historians would disagree on the rigidity of the relationship of agriculture to these other aspects of historical processes, few would deny the necessity of considering them as possibilities and of exploring their particular expressions in different times and places.

Agriculture in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages was characterized by great diversity from region to region and by dependence on farming practices that limited its productivity. Beginning in England and western Europe in the sixteenth century, production of grains increased due to expansion of the area of land under cultivation and the introduction of the intensive farming techniques of convertible husbandry, replacing fallow with legumes that restored the soil and provided pasture for livestock. These methods increased the productivity of the soil and diversified agricultural products, creating a model of agricultural revolution that other parts of Europe attempted to adopt, but with only mixed success in some parts of the Continent in the twentieth century.

AGRICULTURE IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES

From the perspective of the rural village, Europe in the sixteenth century was made up of a combination of arable fields, natural pastures, woodlands, and wastelands. From the English Midlands across northern France, southern Denmark and Sweden, northern Germany, Poland, and into Russia these lands were often combined into an agrarian regime known as open field or champaign, in which the arable was cultivated in open fields in which each household held strips or furrows. South of this great European plain, the open fields were often divided into small irregular plots. In other areas, such as the enclosed fields of western and central France, in Walachia, and in parts of Lower Saxony, Westphalia, Bavaria, Schleswig, the Baltic lands, Brandenburg, and Hungary, isolated individual farmsteads existed with barriers of trees, hedges, or stone walls separating them from their neighbors.

The cultivation of grains, the principal foodstuff of Europe, took place in a system of crop rotation intended to avoid depleting the mineral content of the soil. In much of northern Europe this was a three-field system: in early autumn a winter cereal such as rye or wheat was planted in one field; in the spring, a second field was sown with barley, oats, or another small grain; the third field was left fallow to restore minerals, and especially nitrogen, needed to grow crops. In early or mid-summer the winter grain was harvested, followed by the spring grain in late summer. Then, in the autumn, the fallow field was planted in a winter cereal, beginning the process again. Farther south a two-field system, alternating grain and fallow, was used.

Rotation systems were maintained in areas of open field by customary rules enforced by the village community, which set common dates for planting and harvesting crops and which also allowed customary rights such as gleaning, which permitted the village poor to gather grain fallen on the ground after the first cut of the harvest. Gleaning, rights to pasture animals on the village common lands, and rights to fallen wood in communal forests were important supplements to the incomes of those in the village who lacked adequate land for subsistence. But while most families were able to keep barnyard animals such as chickens, and occasionally a goat, ownership of livestock such as cows or pigs was unusual. In most of the plain of northern Europe, the plow used was a heavy wheeled one, with a coulter in front to cut the turf, and a moldboard to turn the furrow to the side. In southern Europe, the plow used was a lighter one, without wheels, coulter, or moldboard, that only scratched the earth. Harvesting was occasionally done with a scythe, but more often the more labor-intensive sickle was used, since it did less damage to the ears of the grain and left a higher stalk, providing more straw for the villagers.

The productivity of this agricultural system was low in modern terms. The restoration of soil fertility by fallowing took one-third or one-half of the arable land out of cultivation each year. The principal fertilizer used was animal manure, produced by grazing animals either on natural meadow and pasture or on fields left fallow, but the small number of livestock limited its availability. In these conditions yields were relatively low: Slicher van Bath's compilation shows medieval returns on seed planted for wheat of about four to one, rising by the late eighteenth century to between six and seven to one on the Continent and to nine or ten to one in England. Rye and oats were also important cereal crops, producing slightly higher returns on seed than wheat (pp. 328–333).

In many parts of rural Europe the community itself was in an uneasy relationship with a lord who possessed ultimate control over the land. In medieval and early modern Europe land tenure was rarely in the form of a fee simple, in which the cultivator possessed complete control over the land. More often, some form of leasehold was the case, in which the tenant was restricted in the cultivation of the land and was required to pay rents, entry fines due when the land was inherited, and other obligations, such as the requirement to use the lord's court, to grind grain in his mill, to provide a number of days of labor service, and to pay the tithe in support of the parish church. These requirements could be very severe, as in eastern Europe where serfdom gave peasants few avenues of recourse against their lords; in other areas, however, customary law or centralizing monarchies protected peasant communities against the excessive demands of their lords, especially after the Black Death in 1348 had removed the late-medieval labor surplus in rural Europe.

These institutional aspects of agrarian society affected the ways in which the soil was cultivated. In an economy whose principle purpose was the production of foodstuffs, one form of agricultural household economy in early modern Europe consisted of a peasant family attempting to produce enough to feed its members, leading to a polyculture with an emphasis on grains. But dues, fines, and services owed by the peasant to his lord, and the tithe owed to the Church, also shaped production. Where these were paid in kind, peasants could be required to produce crops stipulated by the lord, and lords who were oriented toward the markets of towns and cities in their region or even in other parts of Europe could insist on the planting of more salable crops. Peasants could also be forced into the market themselves. Where dues had been commuted into money payments, peasants had to sell a part of their crop to gain the money to pay these dues. Especially in the more commercialized areas of western Europe, these markets could be very significant forces in agriculture, spurring practices such as those in the Upper Rhine, where the multiple governments of the region followed a policy intervening in the markets for meat and grain to ensure an adequate supply for the cities and towns of the region.

THE ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURAL IMPROVEMENT

Beginning in the sixteenth century, especially in England and Holland, the low returns that characterized European agriculture began to increase. While solid data is lacking, and there has been disagreement among historians over its interpretation, this increase apparently occurred in two long phases: slow growth in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, then again in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century. These increases occurred as a result both of more intensive farming and of bringing more land under cultivation. Improved crop and rotation systems increased the productivity of the land, breaking the closed circuit of traditional agriculture by the introduction of new crops, especially clover and turnips. These crops replaced fallow with a useful crop, increasing the supply of fodder, and allowing more livestock and greater manure production. They also helped the fields: clover fixed atmospheric nitrogen into the soil, replacing the nitrogen depleted by the growth of cereals; and turnips smothered weeds in fields, improving later cereal harvests.

To some extent, although how much is subject to debate, these increases in production took place within the existing agrarian system. For example, swamp drainage, as in Holland and eastern England, increased available land, and open-field systems adjusted in some places to changing economic circumstances. M. A. Havinden showed that, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Oxfordshire, in the middle of English open-field country, improvement took place through subtle changes in the open-field system. The area of grassland was increased through planting sainfoin and clover as winter feed for livestock. Combined with the increased supply of manure provided by larger herds, these crops increased the fertility of the soil and allowed elimination of some, but not all, fallows. Pulses, planted as a part of more intensive cultivation, increased the feed supply for livestock. Arable land planted in grain decreased, but the higher productivity of the soil not only maintained the previous level of production, but also allowed a shift from rye, barley, and oats to wheat. Thus, without a significant modification of the landscape, an ascending spiral of increased productivity and production occurred.

ENCLOSURE: THE ENGLISH MODEL

Individual ownership of fields allowed for even more rapid improvement. Especially in England and northwestern Europe, increased security of tenure allowed yeomen and peasants to increase the productivity of their fields by adopting some aspects of convertible husbandry. More controversially, improvement also came about through the enclosure of common fields, a practice that especially marked English agricultural history. Enclosure took place by common agreement in many English villages in the late Middle Ages and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and much of England outside of the Midlands had already been enclosed in this fashion before 1700 or had never been cultivated in open fields. But while about three million acres may have been enclosed by private agreement, another six to seven million acres were enclosed by parliamentary act, a technique that dominated enclosure after 1700 and was especially prevalent after 1750.

Enclosure by agreement could be a time-consuming and expensive process, requiring the consent not only of property owners but also of those with only use rights to the land. Enclosure by parliamentary act was easier, since it required the approval of the lord of the manor (who might be the instigator), the tithe owner, and the owners (but not those holding only use rights) of four-fifths of the land. Following passage of the act, the lands of the village were surveyed and redistributed as private holdings to the property owners. The result by either method could be a dramatic transformation of the lands of the village. Great Linford in Buckinghamshire, for example, was enclosed by agreement in 1658; new hedges were planted, roads and ditches were built, and enclosed pastures, most of them eventually rented to tenants supplying the London market for meat and dairy products, replaced the old open fields.

In classic histories of English agricultural development, such as Chambers and Mingay's The Agricultural Revolution 1750–1880, enclosure provided the basis for the implementation of convertible husbandry and for increases in labor and crop productivity, a necessary step toward agricultural revolution. This has been criticized by scholars such as Robert Allen, and it must be recognized that increases in production in some places were more the result of bringing more acreage under cultivation than of higher yields from existing arable lands. In County Durham, for example, studied by R. I. Hodgson, parliamentary enclosure in the late eighteenth century brought commons, moors, and wasteland under grain cultivation, and while some of this was farmed under improved rotations incorporating clover and turnips, much of it was cultivated under the older three-field system. David Grigg's study of south Lincolnshire showed that production was increased in the late eighteenth century by bringing marginal land under cultivation and by improving drainage. While the high grain prices of the Napoleonic era spurred production increases, they worked against the adoption of intensive farming techniques. But when prices fell after 1814, these techniques became necessary for farmers to survive, and, in what later came to be called high farming, sheep-rearing, fertilizers, root crops, and claying were used to increase returns on seed.

Enclosure took place because of the prospect of increasing income by bringing unused land under cultivation, gaining higher productivity through more intensive farming, and charging higher rents for more valuable land. But it brought costs, both public and private, associated with the passage of the act itself, and with the physical changes to the land. The costs of enclosure may have been high and charged disproportionately to smaller estates, and enclosure created some farms that were too small to be economically viable. One consequence therefore was the sale of smaller farms and estates at or shortly after enclosure. This might mean consolidation of larger estates, but there is also evidence of an increase in the number of owner-occupiers, especially during the most intense period of enclosure, the Napoleonic Wars.

English agricultural development was therefore a very complex process, with both intensive and extensive aspects. But for most commentators on agriculture it has served as a model against which agricultural systems in other parts of Europe and, in the twentieth century, the world are measured. This English model emphasizes the efficiency and higher productivity of larger farms over peasant smallholders because of their ability to make use of better crop and rotation systems, to increase animal husbandry, and to implement new farming techniques. It therefore points to the necessity of consolidating landholding, as occurred in England through enclosure, as the avenue to agricultural growth.

While it is increasingly doubtful, as we have already seen, that England itself followed only this path to agricultural development, it is certainly true that Continental Europe (except Holland) has had difficulty meeting the expectations of this model of supposedly successful "agricultural revolution." It has instead seemed hindered by peasant cultivators focused on autoconsumption rather than production for a market, the ability of the peasant community to resist innovation, and the absence of improving landlords. While, as in England, the Continent saw a slow recovery of agricultural production in the two centuries after the Black Death in 1348, it also experienced the long seventeenth-century depression marked by low prices and declining rents on land. In Spain and Italy the decline appears to have begun early in the century, perhaps as early as 1600 and accelerated after the 1620s. In France, the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715) was marked by initial stagnation and then, beginning around 1660 or 1670, a sharp decline in regions as different as the Beauvaisis, Provence, and the west.

THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION

The eighteenth century, in contrast, was a period of rising prices in much of Europe as market demand rose for agricultural products, stimulating attempts to increase production. A slow increase in population began with the recovery after the late fourteenth century, increased into the seventeenth century, and then accelerated in the eighteenth. Rural smallholders in some parts of Europe living through both agriculture and by employments such as spinning and weaving cloth for urban merchants were unable to produce enough to feed themselves and, along with growing urban populations, this created increased demand for agricultural products. The first quarter of the century saw only minor indications of the transition from depression to growth, but Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse's Histoire économique et sociale de la France shows that after 1726 prices steadily increased until they leveled off in the 1780s (pp. 329–405). Further east, in the Baltic and North Sea area, the demand for grain and cattle also came from international trade with England and northwestern Europe.

Increased demand was only one of the factors in the late eighteenth century stimulating agricultural improvement in continental Europe. The dissemination of literature advocating scientific farming, and the foundation of schools to teach these methods, began the process of spreading the methods imported from Holland and England. The physiocratic doctrines elaborated in France beginning in the 1750s argued that land and agriculture were the sole sources of wealth, and combined with mercantilistic doctrines in central and eastern Europe these theories encouraged rulers to adopt policies improving agriculture. Anglomania among the educated classes in eastern and central Europe did the same. There were therefore numerous attempts by rulers and their administrators to enclose communal lands and consolidate landholdings in the states of the Holy Roman Empire, in Scandinavia, in the Habsburg Empire, and in Russia and Poland.

The effects of these changes on agricultural production and techniques, however, have been difficult to establish. Cultivation by peasants of crops that fell outside of the rent system was one possible response to increased market demand for agricultural products. Landlords might have difficulty exploiting the opportunity through more intensive farming because of problems in obtaining adequate effort from peasant laborers, competition with peasants for common lands, and a shortage of manure.

In France, the first part of the eighteenth century saw a shift from earlier abandonment of arable to clearing wastelands for cultivation, a trend that became more pronounced after mid-century but that may have added only about 2.5 percent to the arable of the country by 1789. There was also a slow decline in fallowing and a shift from rye to wheat production. But only in the second part of the century is there evidence of any significant increase in agricultural production, the result not only of these modest improvements in agricultural practices but also of more favorable weather in the last few decades of the Old Regime.

When placed against the English model, especially the intensive farming that seemed to contribute so much to the increased agricultural production of that country, continental Europe has therefore seemed marked by agricultural stagnation. But the regional diversity of the early modern economy, pre-eighteenth-century attempts at expansion in the agricultural sector, and the multiple routes, outside of enclosure, toward this expansion are becoming increasingly apparent to historians. This is especially the case in northwestern Europe, where yields around 1800 seem to have been as high as in England. Philip Hoffman has argued that in some parts of France, such as Normandy, the area near Paris, and parts of southeastern France, there were spurts of growth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were the result of both intensive and extensive improvements. New crops were planted, meadow and arable increased, and market-oriented vineyards developed. But political crises such as the Wars of Religion and state tax policies disrupted these growth spurts. There is also evidence from Basse-Auvergne and Dauphiné showing the ability of smaller farmers to adopt diversified crop rotations. Thus, in this revisionist view, increases in agricultural production occurred, and it was not so much small farms, immobile peasants, or weak markets that hindered agricultural growth as it was events outside of agriculture that disrupted this growth when it did occur.

Commercialization also was an important factor in increasing agricultural production in central Europe in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Increased fodder made more livestock possible, increasing as much as 150 percent between 1750 and 1800 in parts of Prussia. This enabled farmers to decrease fallowing and increase grain production, and specialization in commercial crops, especially wheat for export to western Europe, became more common.

But even as production increased, agriculture in much of continental Europe continued to use older rotation and cropping systems; livestock and artificial fertilizers were rare, and returns on seed remained low. Improvement continued to be slow into the nineteenth century. Gabriel Désert and Robert Specklin claim that in France, in spite of the turmoil and disruptions of the Revolution and empire, fallows were reduced by 20 percent, the amount of arable planted in wheat increased by 10 percent, and, following an estimate made by the Société d'économie politique, the gross agricultural product increased by 11 percent in the quarter century between 1789 and 1815 (pp. 107, 138). But in many parts of the country techniques remained unchanged. In 1840 fallowing and wasteland remained common, especially in the south and west, where more than 30 percent of the land area was unused; only in the north and east, and some parts of the southwest, had significant progress been made in bringing more land under cultivation.

Division of common lands in France also occurred slowly, in spite of pressure from agricultural reformers. Increasing production in the first half of the century was made difficult by one long period of price decline until the early 1830s and another at mid-century, and by increases in land rents and labor costs. Nonetheless, by mid-century, cereal production had increased by more than 40 percent over the beginning of the century, and an increased part of this was wheat, replacing rye as the principal grain for market. Other crops, such as potatoes and sugar beets, had also been introduced, and this greatly increased food supply. Livestock increased by a quarter to a third, especially during the 1830s and 1840s.

Land reforms carried out in Prussia and some west German states in the first half of the nineteenth century provided opportunities for division of commons and consolidation of landholding. At the same time, improvements in transport made commercial agriculture more attractive. Agricultural production in central Europe slowly increased in the decades before 1840: cereal production in Prussia rose from 4.6 million tons in 1816 to 6.8 million in 1840, the weight of livestock increased, and other parts of German Europe witnessed similar gains. As in France, these gains were in many places the results not only of the implementation of scientific farming methods but also of the reduction of fallow and cultivation of former wastelands and meadows. But across Europe these increases in production were fragile: the crisis of the late 1840s dropped production back to close to the levels of the turn of the century, reminding Europeans how closely they lived to bare subsistence.

THE GROWTH OF COMMERCIAL AGRICULTURE AFTER 1850

It was during the two decades after 1850 that the countryside in western and central Europe, spurred by transport and market improvements, truly opened toward great increases in production. Secondary roads were improved, making it easier for products to get to markets and for manufactured equipment, such as scythes and the improved Dombasle plow, to reach peasants. The railroad, especially secondary lines, created national markets for agricultural products: grain and livestock could be sent to major cities, ending the threat of famine there, and fertilizer could be shipped to peasants anxious to increase the productivity of their land. Prices rose after 1850, as did both rural wages and emigration from the countryside to cities, increasing rural incomes and stimulating agricultural production for the market. Gabriel Désert has shown that while in France the expansion of the area planted in cereals ceased in 1862, other crops, such as potatoes, beets, and vines were in full expansion, as was livestock (pp. 247–251), and Maurice Levy-Leboyer estimated that the value of French agricultural production increased by 80 percent between 1852 and 1882 (p. 803).

It is not clear that these increases were due to substantive changes in agricultural practices. In France, rising prices certainly contributed to the increased value, and production increased by only 25 percent. The productivity of the soil increased only slightly, and, for cereals, remained 38 percent behind that of Great Britain. France lagged far behind other European countries in the production of livestock. A similar pattern is found elsewhere. In Prussian Upper Silesia grain production had increased rapidly between 1846 and 1861, growth due to increases in both acreage under cultivation and yields. These slowed after 1861, and from the 1860s to the 1890s growth in production continued but at reduced rates. Only after 1890 did yields again rise, generating growth in production even though acreage under cultivation stagnated.

The weaknesses of continental European agriculture became apparent in the twenty-five years after 1870, when a long decline in agricultural prices occurred. This was the consequence of the development of a global market that created competition, especially in cereals, with producers in other parts of the world. Unless protected by tariffs, many European grain producers, aristocrat and peasant alike, had trouble dealing with cheap imports from the Americas. Although prices improved somewhat in the 1890s and after the turn of the century, the ability of wheat producers in the North American Midwest to undersell European farmers even in European markets pointed out in glaring fashion the limitations imposed by the low productivity of European agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century. The depression forced difficult choices on many of the small peasant farmers in western and central Europe, and for some a retreat from the market and a return to production aimed primarily at autoconsumption was a logical strategy. For others, however, the depression forced rapid adoption of means, such as chemical fertilizers, that increased land productivity. Concentration on commercial dairy farming was a key recourse in Holland and Denmark. While agricultural production stagnated in some countries, such as England, it increased rapidly in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Scandinavia.

In parts of central Europe and farther east the development of agriculture was complicated by the survival into the nineteenth century of serfdom, a system that left many peasants in servitude to their lords, with little incentive or resources to increase the productivity of the land they worked. The end of serfdom in these lands came in the course of the nineteenth century. But creating free peasants was one thing and increasing agricultural productivity another. Agricultural reformers in the bureaucracies of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia sought to improve agricultural productivity, but without launching major reforms of landholding and without great success. Eastern European agriculture remained marked by farms composed of scattered plots of land, a low level of investment, poor links to markets, and a low level of productivity.

These problems were especially evident in the Russian Empire, the world's largest exporter of cereals at the end of the nineteenth century. Emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 did little to increase output or change methods of cultivation. After the turn of the century, there was some consolidation of landholding, encouraged by the Stolypin reforms of 1906, which attempted to divide communally held lands into individual farms. These farms, it was hoped, would use improved rotations, plant grass crops, and become more productive, creating the exportable surplus on which the Russian economy depended.

But by the eve of World War I Russian agriculture had made only slight improvements in production. Heavy taxation and unequal terms of trade between towns and countryside limited investment in agriculture. Russian agriculture was still focused on cereal production and often used three-field rotation systems that left much land fallow each year. Even after a decade the reforms of 1906 had only affected a small proportion of the countryside. Russia suffered from increased competition from American wheat in its traditional export markets of northwestern Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and like all European wheat producers it faced declining prices from 1873 until the 1890s. Its most important crop remained grain, and the continuation of communal agriculture in most villages into the 1920s, with its periodic redistribution of land, meant that individual peasants had little ability or incentive to improve the land that they farmed.

WESTERN EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The development of a global market for agricultural products in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries conditioned developments in the agricultural systems of all countries in Europe. The uneven improvement in productivity that characterized the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in different abilities to compete in the global market, leading to different strategies in the twentieth century to increase production and productivity. The inability of agricultural systems to compete even in their own domestic markets led in the 1890s to protective tariffs in many countries. But while this protection may have limited the social effects of competition and preserved small peasant farms, it also reduced incentives to increase agricultural productivity.

Social experiments, such as collectivization in the Soviet Union and in eastern Europe, were intended to increase production, as were policies of consolidation and of intense cultivation of smaller farms. The record of these policies is inconsistent, but it appears that peasant family farmers were able to raise productivity while large collective farms struggled to meet production goals.

In France, for example, the many small farms of less than 5 hectares that existed in the nineteenth century declined dramatically from more than half of landholdings in 1929 to about one quarter in 1983. Very large farms, of more than 100 hectares, increased only slightly, but medium-sized farms of 5 to 100 hectares came to dominate French agriculture (60 percent in 1983). The poorer regions of the south and the Massif Central followed the north and east in reducing fallowing and the use of artificial fertilizers. Falling farm prices that began in the late 1920s and continued through the 1930s accentuated the rural exodus that began in the late nineteenth century, and after World War II the shortage of labor encouraged the adoption of labor-saving machinery not only on the large cereal farms of the north and east but even on the poorer family farms of the south and west, where after 1945 a "tractor revolution" mechanized production.

These developments were widespread in western Europe. The years of prosperity between the end of World War II and the recession of 1973–1974 transformed western European agriculture through a combination of increased competition and state management. The most important aspect of this was the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Economic Community formed in 1958. This policy was highly controversial, but the EEC took some steps toward accomplishing its goals of creating a single market for agricultural goods with common prices, protecting the farmers of the member countries against foreign competition, and promoting rationalization of agricultural production. Its pricing mechanism tended to set prices higher than market because of political pressures, and the result was not so much rationalization as overproduction, whose costs are borne by the member nations through a system of price subsidies that limited the market impetus for change in the structure of agriculture.

The EEC did open new markets within Europe for farmers in its member countries, although for some products, such as wine, it removed the protection that tariffs had provided since the 1890s. Some governments passed measures, such as French laws of 1960 and 1962, encouraging the retirement of older farmers and the consolidation of property holding. Greater organization and cooperation among farmers improved crops, livestock, and farm management. Productivity increased to the point that surplus, rather than shortage, became the major problem in agricultural policy making.

Many of the changes in western European agriculture over the twentieth century could be seen in Buzetsur-Tarn, a village in southeastern France that in the nineteenth century was dominated by small family farms either owned, sharecropped, or leased by their cultivators. Agricultural improvement during the nineteenth century came about not through dramatic increases in the productivity of wheat fields, but through the development of crops—hay, vegetables, and wine—that could be transported to market on the railroad that came to the town in 1864. But the phylloxera infestation of the 1880s and 1890s hurt the vineyards, and by the period between the World Wars market gardening was also in decline. Peasant polyculture revived, with farms again producing primarily wheat, fodder, and a little wine. There was some mechanization of harvesting between the wars, the result of the rural labor shortage. Fertilizer was used, but only in small quantities.

Significant increases in agricultural productivity came only after 1950. Between 1950 and 1962 most farmers acquired tractors. Dairy products replaced vegetables as a market crop, and by the 1960s a new generation of farmers adopted intensive methods to increase crop yields. Combines and seed drills came into use. Dairy farming increased the amount of manure available, but new seed varieties required intensive artificial fertilizing. In the 1970s the use of herbicides and fungicides became common. To maximize their ability to use these new methods of cultivation, the young farmers of Buzet took advantage of the French government-sponsored process of remembrement, the consolidation through exchanges of scattered landholdings into large fields. Irrigation projects were developed to deal with summer drought, and improvements in drainage, made cooperatively with European Economic Community assistance, increased the production of winter crops and made it possible to work in the fields without getting stuck in the muddy clay.

AGRICULTURE IN EASTERN EUROPE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Such success stories remain tenuous in western Europe because of the threat of declining crop prices to the newly efficient and productive family farmers in villages such as Buzet. But they remain a different experience than that of eastern Europe in the twentieth century. The emancipation of serfs in Russia and elsewhere in eastern Europe in the nineteenth century opened the possibility of reforms of the agricultural systems there by developing private landholding and improving rotation systems, but in the twentieth century the hopes of agricultural reformers remained only imperfectly fulfilled.

While most of eastern Europe was agricultural prior to World War I, the great landed estates of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and present-day Poland had not been able to increase their productivity. Throughout the region, land reforms were carried out in the aftermath of World War I. Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia became countries of small peasant proprietors. Ambitious plans for reform in Hungary and Poland were delayed and then moderated for political reasons. Both countries had many large landowners, especially in eastern Poland and central and eastern Hungary, who produced cereals or other products, such as timber, for national and international markets.

The motives for land reforms were political, social, and national, and little thought was given to their economic consequences. Increasing production was difficult for small peasant farmers who lacked capital to invest, technical knowledge and equipment, and efficient transportation. For example, wheat raised in Hungary was unable to compete against American wheat in the Munich market because of high relative production and transportation costs, even though only a few hundred miles separated Hungary from Munich. East European agricultural production therefore stagnated between the World Wars, in some instances actually declining in the 1920s before recovering in the early 1930s. There was some mechanization in the 1920s, but in the 1930s, with declining prices and cheap labor, many tractors stood idle for lack of economic incentives to use them.

Bumper wheat and rice crops around the world created a glut of basic foodstuffs in the world market in the late 1920s, cutting farm incomes across eastern Europe. As the Great Depression spread, prices for manufactured goods remained relatively high, creating a "price scissors" for peasants, in which they continued paying high prices for manufactured goods while receiving less for the crops they sold. This was especially severe in 1932–1934, striking smallholders particularly hard because, unlike large landholders, they were not protected by government export policies. Peasant purchasing power did not recover significantly in the 1930s, leaving them not only with a declining standard of living but also unable either to make improvements to increase productivity and become more competitive, or to repay loans drawn in the 1920s to improve farms or carry operating expenses from one year to the next. Many of the peasants who had received land in 1919 were forced to sell it back to their former landlords to pay debts, and agriculture throughout eastern Europe became divided into large farms of over fifty hectares and peasant smallholders with less than five hectares.

In Russia, the disruptions caused by the Revolution of 1917, the civil war that followed, the collectivization of agriculture in 1929–1930, the Nazi invasion during World War II, and Soviet policies aimed at managing agricultural production and organization transformed the country from the largest exporter of grain in the world at the beginning of the century to the world's largest importer of grain and livestock products by the 1980s. Particularly devastating was the policy of forced collectivization, in which individual farms and communally held lands were brought into either collective farms (kolkhozy) or the more disciplined state farms (sovkhozy).

While one aspect of collectivization was the creation of a rural landscape in which mechanization and other modern farming techniques could be used, it nevertheless proved disastrous. In the short run, collectivization destroyed independent family farmers, the kulaks; led to the slaughter of horses, cattle, and other livestock by peasants to avoid turning them over to the collective farms; and created a famine in the early 1930s. In the long run, the modest gains of the Stolypin era (1906–1916) and the market-oriented New Economic Policy (1923–1928) in the productivity of arable land were reversed. The total grain harvest of the former imperial territory only regained its 1913 level in 1952–1954; the number of livestock returned to its 1928 level only in 1956.

A Virgin Lands program begun in 1954 brought under cultivation previously unused lands throughout the USSR, especially in eastern Kazakhstan. This program began to pay off in 1956, helping produce a record grain crop in that year. But these lands did not initially require fertilizers, and while wheat production increased initially, problems remained in other parts of the agricultural sector, such as vegetables and livestock. The diversion of equipment and expertise to the virgin lands in the east led to decreased returns in older agricultural areas in the western areas of the USSR. A goal set in the 1950s of matching American diets was never met because of low production of meat and dairy products. By 1963 the natural fertility of the virgin lands was exhausted, harvests declined, and a drought made grain shortages again a part of Soviet life. In 1963, for the first time, the Soviet Union became an importer of wheat.

The Soviet experiment in managing agricultural production through collectivization was extended after World War II to the countries of eastern Europe that became Peoples' Democracies. A first collectivization drive occurred immediately after the consolidation of Communist power in the late 1940s, but met with resistance from peasants seeking to maintain control of the farms they had only recently gained through the breakup of landed estates at the end of World War II. But there were significant variations from country to country. Private agriculture remained the rule in Yugoslavia, which after its political break with Moscow in 1948 ceased to emulate the Stalinist economic model, and in Poland, where only about 23 percent of the land was put into collective and state farms during the Stalinist phase from 1948 to 1956. During the October 1956 revolt in Poland 80 percent of collective farms were dissolved by their members, and by 1970, private farms still made up 86 percent of the arable land in that country.

In other parts of Eastern Europe, a second collectivization push, in 1958–1961, was more successful and often brought most of the land into state or collective farms. In Czechoslovakia, for example, only 15 percent of the population worked in agriculture by 1968, but over 95 percent of agriculture was collectivized. In Hungary, where peasant opposition to the regime had been an important part of the unsuccessful 1956 revolution, a drive begun in 1959 nevertheless brought virtually all land into the state sector by 1961. The German Democratic Republic also collectivized most of its agricultural land in this period.

But collectivization was no more successful in Eastern Europe than in the Soviet Union in raising productivity. Only the German Democratic Republic matched western European increases in productivity. In most of the Peoples' Democracies, economic planning focused on industrializing what were, except for Czechoslovakia, primarily agricultural economies. These policies siphoned investment away from agriculture, making improvement in productivity difficult and, in many of the Peoples' Democracies, minimal. In Hungary, the collectivized ownership structure was not questioned, but by the late 1960s more importance was given to market forces for collective farms, and production increased as prices were allowed to rise. Private plots, which were the most productive form of agriculture in all of the Peoples' Democracies, were actively encouraged and, as producers of livestock, dairy products, eggs, vegetables, and fruits, became important parts of the agricultural sector. In Poland, the 1970s saw, perversely, attempts to reduce the importance of private agriculture: state investment went into the inefficient state sector, while private farmers found it difficult to obtain supplies. As a result, the proportion of land privately farmed had fallen to 75 percent in 1980. But agricultural supplies had also decreased. The government was forced to pay increased price subsidies to maintain urban food prices at a reasonable level, and there were a series of political crises triggered by government attempts to reduce the gap between prices at the point of supply and those in urban markets.

After the fall of the Peoples' Democracies of Eastern Europe in 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the countries of Eastern Europe moved at varying speeds toward more market-oriented economies and greater integration into the world market. In countries where private landownership was already widespread and where producer and consumer prices for agricultural products quickly were turned over to the market rather than state policy, such as Hungary, this occurred rapidly. The results of these changes were a movement of population from agriculture to other sectors of the economy (in Hungary farm labor dropped from 19 percent in 1992 to 8 percent in 1997 as a share of employment) and increases in labor productivity. Elsewhere, as in the Czech Republic or Russia, reforms were slower, accentuating long-term shortfalls and decreases in agricultural production. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc also disrupted market systems throughout eastern Europe. Even in the most advanced countries, the search for adequate markets and prices for agricultural goods remained a major task, and became even more difficult as the more advanced countries moved into the European Union, leaving their former trading partners behind. Agriculture in Eastern Europe therefore continued to face its long-standing problems of raising production and productivity, while facing new challenges of finding markets for its products.

CONCLUSION

The histories of European agriculture since the Renaissance emphasize both the prominence of a specific model of agricultural change, an agricultural revolution in which large enclosed estates allowed the implementation of intensive farming practices and increased the productivity of the land and overall agricultural production, and the rarity with which that model appears to have actually occurred. In England, the basis for the model, increases in production were the result of extensions of cultivation as well as improvements in productivity, and these improvements were achieved by yeomen farmers as well as on large estates. On the Continent, well into the twentieth century, placing more land under cultivation was often as important as increases in productivity in raising agricultural output, and many parts of Europe remain unable to increase productivity levels to those attained at the end of the English model. The history of European agriculture remains marked by uncertainties paralleling those of soil, weather, and blight that mark the cultivation of the land itself.

See alsoCapitalism and Commercialization (in this volume);Peasants and Rural Laborers (volume 3); and other articles in this section.

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