I.4. Modern Agriculture

An increased supply of manure, that is, more livestock kept while the area of land used to produce their fodder was restricted, on the one hand, and greater adaptability to the needs of the market on the other: these were the two chief requirements that the new agriculture had to serve, for whose development the bourgeois revolution created the legal ground, after the technical and social preconditions had been given earlier.

The increase in livestock, however, met a need not only of arable farming but also of the market. Since the sixteenth century the consumption of meat had indeed declined in the towns too, but only relatively, in proportion to the numbers of the urban population, and not always absolutely. On the contrary, the growth of this population in many cases took on a rapid pace, and nowhere in the towns was the relative decline in the consumption of meat as great as in the countryside. For all the misery, the standard of living in the towns is higher, partly as a result of the influence of the high standard of living of the capitalists and aristocrats, who consume in the towns the fruits of their exploitation of the whole country, and partly because the concentration of the wage-labourers makes their struggle over wages easier; and also because the urban way of life and work is bound up with so many injuries to health that the reproduction of labour-power in the town requires a higher standard of living than in the countryside. The townsman, who works in enclosed rooms and in many cases strains his nerves one-sidedly rather than his muscles, needs easily digestible meat to a greater degree than the agricultural labourer, if he is to remain fit for work. But the relatively greater extension of meat consumption in the town than in the countryside may also have been made easier by the fact that before the introduction of railways livestock was the agricultural product that could be transported most easily and furthest (on the hoof), the one that the countryman living far from the market could most readily bring there.

According to Settegast, the costs of transport on a highway today amount, as a percentage of the value of the goods, per hundredweight and mile, to: straw 15.00, potatoes 10.00, hay 7.50, milk and fresh fruit 3.75, rye, barley and oats 2.00, wheat and pulses 1.50, live animals 0.25. The difference between the costs of transporting the other products, even wheat, and those of live animals is enormous.

The difference between urban and rural consumption of meat has been measured statistically in France. There, according to the inquiry of 1882, the consumption of meat per head in that year was:

Since 1882, moreover, a tendency has appeared in France for the difference in meat consumption between town and country to even out. In the town it is decreasing, in the country increasing. According to the inquiry of 1892, consumption of meat per head among the urban population fell, compared with 1882, from 64.60 to 58.12 kilograms, by 6.48 kilograms, while among the rural population it rose from 21.89 to 26.25 kilograms, that is, by 4.36 kilograms.

The more rapidly large-scale capitalist industry and the means of transport developed and the towns grew, the more rapidly the demand for meat was bound to rise, even if the prosperity of the population increased neither in the countryside nor in the town. Indeed, the consumption of meat could grow while prosperity declined within the town, or in the countryside, or in both at once, provided only that the towns grew rapidly enough. The growth in meat consumption to which the apologetic economists so like to point is anything but an infallible sign of an increase in national prosperity; the far less disputable and more conspicuous relative, often also absolute, decline in the numbers of the rural population, as against the urban population increasing rapidly both absolutely and relatively, is often enough to explain the growth in meat consumption, so far as it takes place at all. It must also be furthered by the fall in the birth-rate, that is, by the increase in the proportion of the age-groups that eat meat and the decrease of the element of the population that eats no meat or little, the small children.

In an article by O. Gerlach on Meat Consumption and Meat Prices in the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, several examples are recorded of towns that in the first half of our century show in general not a growth but a decrease in the consumption of meat. In Munich the annual consumption of beef, veal, mutton and pork per head was:

From then on consumption rises somewhat.

In Hamburg the average annual consumption of meat per family was:

Among the more recent examples of falling meat consumption the most striking is probably Paris, whose population increased by 300,000 from 1887 to 1896, while its annual consumption of meat fell in the same period from 185 millions to 173 millions. Here, then, there is not merely a relative but even an absolute decrease in the consumption of meat. This, however, is an exceptional phenomenon. As a rule the growth of the great cities proceeds so rapidly that the consumption of meat in the towns, and so in the country, rises absolutely, even if in the former it falls relatively.

The absolute increase in the consumption of meat was made possible by the increase in livestock that marks the first half of our century. In the eight older Prussian provinces, for example, the number of sheep was:

Sheep-farming reached its peak at the beginning of the sixties. In 1864 there were 19,314,667 sheep in the territory named, in 1883 only 12,362,936. This fall is to be explained mainly by overseas competition, a phenomenon of which we shall have more to say. With it a new epoch begins for agriculture. For the present we are dealing in general only with the conditions that held until the beginning of the seventies, even if we sometimes use more recent material to illustrate what is said, where the tendency has not changed and sufficient material from earlier times is not available. This is mentioned here to prevent misunderstandings.

Along with sheep-farming the rest of the livestock increased too. In the eight older provinces of Prussia there were:

The increase in the production of meat, however, was still greater than these figures indicate, because at the same time, in the course of this century, a considerable increase in the average weight of the individual animals took place. Thaer reckons the average live weight of a cow at 450 pounds; some twenty-five years later (in 1834) Schweitzer assumes an average weight of 500–600 pounds for a cow. Today there are numerous farms on which the cows weigh 1,000, even 1,200 pounds on average.

According to the French agricultural inquiry of 1892, the average weight of meat in France was:

Along with the increase in the production of meat, however, there also came an increase in the production of grain. This phenomenon can be followed most clearly in France since the Revolution of 1789. The production there was estimated, in millions of hectolitres, at:

Whence these astonishing results? They are a product of the revolution in the whole system of agriculture that followed, in England, the revolutions of the seventeenth century, and on the continent of Europe the Revolution of 1789 and its aftermath.

Once the landowner had obtained full private property in his land, once the compulsory rotation and the common grazing of stubble and fallow had ceased and the common land had been divided, all compulsion on him to go on feeding his cattle on pasture ceased. The technical conditions for a higher kind of livestock farming were already given, since a number of fodder crops had been introduced that yielded far greater quantities of fodder on the same area than pasture. If the pasture was turned into arable and planted with fodder crops, and the cattle, instead of being driven out to pasture, were kept and fed in the stall in summer too, far more cattle could be kept on the same area without restricting the grain land in the least. On the contrary. The advantages of growing fodder crops and of stall-feeding were so great that it was by no means necessary to devote all the pasture turned into arable to fodder crops. One needed to use only part of it for them, and could still increase the livestock. The other part of the newly won land could be given over to grain.

Enormous areas of land were won for grain in this way. According to Roscher, under the three-field system scarcely 20 per cent of the area of the fields could be sown with bread grains on soil of middling quality. Thünen, on the other hand, assumed that with crop rotation and stall-feeding 55, even 60 per cent of the area could be used for growing grain.

At the same time, however, the increased livestock brought the fields more manure and more numerous draught animals. That alone was enough to improve the cultivation of the soil. Not only did the area under grain grow; the yield of a given area of grain land also increased, thanks to the revolution. The average yield of wheat per hectare is given by the inquiry in France already mentioned as follows:

But the effects of the revolution in the relations of production did not stop here.

Once the landowner had obtained full private property in his land, the compulsion also ceased to grow nothing but grain on the area not used to feed the cattle. He could also grow other plants that the market demanded, whose requirements became more and more decisive for the cultivation of the soil — plants that under the old three-field system he had as a rule either not been allowed to cultivate at all, or only in his garden: plants used for food, such as potatoes and pulses, or commercial crops (oil plants such as rape and poppy, fibre plants such as flax or hemp, dye plants such as madder and woad, spice plants, hops, caraway, or other commercial crops such as tobacco).

In growing these various plants one after another, and alternating them with grain and fodder crops, it was found that they did not all exhaust the soil in the same way, and that yields could be greatly increased by a rational succession of different kinds of crop. Some, grain, oil and fibre plants, take their nourishment chiefly from the topsoil. These are the soil-exhausting plants. The others spare the soil, and even improve it in some respects, by reducing weeds with their heavy shade, by making the subsoil useful and loosening the soil with their deep roots, and some finally (clover, pulses) by taking nitrogen from the air and accumulating it.

The beneficial effects of crop rotation were already known to the ancient Romans. But it came to be applied systematically on a larger scale only about the middle of the last century, in England, from where crop rotation reached Germany and France. It became general only in our own century.

Crop rotation allowed an extraordinarily large number of combinations, so as to do justice to changing conditions of cultivation and of the market, a number of combinations that grew in the same measure as growing traffic and scientific research acquainted European agriculture with new crops. According to W. Hecke, the agriculture of Central Europe has taken up some 100 different kinds of cultivated plants in the course of time.

Hand in hand with the development of crop rotation, however, went an increasing division of labour among the individual agricultural enterprises. The three-field system had been directed towards satisfying the own needs of the peasant and the lord, and therefore had the same features everywhere throughout Central Europe. Every village, every peasant as a rule produced the same things, whatever the conditions of the soil might be. Now production for the market arose, and with it competition. Now every farmer had to produce whichever of the products in demand he could produce most cheaply, given the nature of the soil and the situation of his farm, the conditions of transport, the capital at his command, the extent of his land, etc. The individual farms developed special lines. Some favour arable farming, others stock-raising, others again fruit-growing or viticulture. The arable farmers and stock-raisers themselves in turn separate into numerous sub-kinds. Some of the latter turn to dairying, others to the production of fat stock, others to the rearing of young animals, etc., etc.

The division of labour has been carried especially far in England and the United States.

“In England further subdivisions are made even within one kind of useful animal, as for example in dairying, where a distinction is made between the production of milk for sale fresh, the production of milk for butter-making and the production of milk for cheese-making. For each particular purpose different breeds of cattle and different methods of stock-raising are customary. … North America must be regarded as the classic land of an extensive division of labour in agriculture.” (Backhaus, “Die Arbeitstheilung in der Landwirthschaft”, Conrads Jahrbücher, 1894, p. 341.)

Under favourable circumstances (suitable climate and soil, high wages, a good market) this division of labour can lead to a revival of pasture farming, but in a higher, more intensive, capitalist form, bound up with a great outlay on permanent installations, on artificial manures, on cultivation work and on stocking with highly productive animals. A modern capitalist pasture farming of this kind is to be found, for example, in the south of England. It has absolutely nothing in common, however, with that of the three-field system.

Besides the division of labour among the individual enterprises within society, there now also develops the division of labour within the enterprise itself, at least within the larger enterprise.

In feudal agriculture the larger enterprise was not essentially superior to the smaller in this respect. The greater part of its labour, both human and animal, was supplied to every manorial estate by the lord’s subjects, the peasants, and they had to perform their services of hand and team with their own tools and implements, carts, ploughs, etc. The difference between the large and the small-scale enterprise did not lie there in the better equipment and further developed division of labour of the former, but in the fact that in the one the peasant owing service performed forced labour for another, as idly and slovenly as possible, with the same means with which in the other he worked for himself, with all the zeal and care that belong to work for oneself and one’s own.

Only modern agriculture, in which the farmer produces on the large farm as on the small with his own tools, his own cattle and his own workers, could develop in the large-scale enterprise a division of labour essentially superior to that prevailing in the peasant enterprise.

The division of labour within the enterprise, the division of labour among enterprises and the variety of crops and kinds of cultivation were all bound to lead to the perfecting of the workers, the tools and implements, the seeds and the breeds of livestock. But they were also bound to increase enormously the farmer’s dependence on the middleman.

Now the peasant no longer produces everything he needs himself, not only as an industrial producer but also as a farmer. He must buy not only more and dearer tools than before but also part of his food, which his specialised farm no longer produces, or no longer produces in sufficient quantity. In particular, with the increasing division of labour the number of farmers grows, especially of the smaller ones, who let grain-growing take second place and must therefore buy grain or flour. Sometimes, too, they no longer produce the seed on their own farm, and as a rule no longer the young stock, at least of the larger animals; separate enterprises devote themselves to the production and improvement of seeds and of the various breeds of livestock, and from them the farmer buys precisely what best suits the particular needs of his farm. On the other hand he in turn sells livestock: partly such as has become useless to him, a dairy farm for example selling cows that no longer give enough milk; partly animals that have reached the stage corresponding to the particular purpose of production of the farm, in a farm rearing young stock, say, animals that have become ready for work or for milk production. The more specialised the farm is, the more the cattle are of use to it only in one form or another, the more rapid the turnover will be. But the more, too, does the middleman’s trade develop, and make dependent on itself above all the small peasant, who does not survey the market and is far more easily put in a tight corner. This becomes an abundantly flowing source of the overreaching and exploitation of the peasant.

The dependence of agriculture on trade grows in general the more trade and traffic develop as a whole, the more the accumulation of capital revolutionises the conditions of transport.

This revolution, which proceeds from urban capital, increases the farmer’s dependence on the market, but also ceaselessly changes the conditions of the market for him. A branch of production that was profitable so long as only a highway connected the nearest market with the world market becomes unprofitable and must be replaced by another when a railway is built through the district, which, for example, brings in cheaper grain, so that grain-growing no longer pays, but at the same time opens up an outlet for milk. Growing traffic also brings ever new or improved crops into the country, and makes it possible to obtain breeding stock, and also stock for use, from ever greater distances. English breeding stock goes all over the world today; how far the shipment of stock for use over longer distances has extended is shown best by the duties on livestock and the clamour of the agrarians for raising them, although livestock is imported not only for immediate slaughter but also for agricultural purposes: lean cattle for fattening, dairy cattle, horses.

But the modern process of revolution in agriculture was raised to a special pitch when the achievements of modern natural science won in the towns — of mechanics, chemistry, and plant and animal physiology — were carried out into the countryside.

First among them is to be named machinery. The brilliant results that the machine achieved in industry were bound to suggest the idea of introducing it into agriculture; the modern large-scale enterprise created the foundations for this with its division of labour — on the one side the division of the workers into manual workers and scientifically trained workers, on the other the specialisation of tools and implements and their adaptation to particular operations — and with mass production for the market.

In agriculture, however, machinery has greater obstacles to overcome than in industry. First of a technical kind. In industry the place of work, the factory, is created artificially and is therefore adapted to the requirements of the machine. In agriculture the place of work of most machines is created by nature, and the machine must adapt itself to it. That is not always easily possible, and sometimes altogether out of the question. As a rule a high degree of cultivation of the soil must already have preceded the use of the machine in agriculture.

But not only technical but also economic difficulties stand in the way of the use of the machine in agriculture. Here most machines are used only during a short period of the year, in industry year in, year out. Other things being equal, therefore, the saving of labour by the machine will be far greater in the latter. If of two machines each replaces 10 workers a day, but the one is at work only 10 days in the year and the other 300 days, the annual saving of labour will amount to 100 working days with the one and 3,000 with the other. If each wears out in 5 years, the total saving of labour by the agricultural machine will amount to 500 working days, that by the industrial machine to 15,000. But that means, if the value of each of these machines is equal, say, to 1,000 working days, that the introduction of the industrial machine signifies a saving of 14,000 working days, that of the agricultural machine, on the other hand, a waste of 500 working days.

The relation is made still worse for agriculture by the fact that in the capitalist mode of production the task of the machine is to save not labour but wages. The lower the wages, the more difficult the introduction of machines. But in the countryside wages are as a rule, for a number of reasons, much lower than in the town, and the incentive to replace human labour by the machine therefore smaller.

To this is added another difference between industry and agriculture. The machine in industry does not as a rule require more intelligent and skilful workers than handicraft or manufacture. The workers whom the industrial modes of production that preceded large-scale industry bring up are sufficient for it. And the worker who works at the same machine year in, year out soon acquires an extraordinary skill in tending it.

It is otherwise with agricultural machines. They are often very complicated and require considerable intelligence to tend them. But it is precisely in the countryside that the conditions for popular education and the development of intelligence have been very unfavourable in recent centuries. Very often the machine does not find there the workers it needs.

Nor does the agricultural labourer work at the same machine the whole year round; he cannot therefore get practised at it as easily as the industrial worker.

Finally, agriculture, unlike large-scale industry, is often carried on far from railways and from engineering works; this makes the transport of heavy machines, and the repair of complicated machines above all, much more difficult and costly.

In spite of all these difficulties the use of machines in agriculture is increasing rapidly, a proof of the perfection they have attained.

For France we have comparable figures for the development over three decades. There were in use in agriculture there:

In the German Empire the agricultural enterprises using the following were counted:

Everywhere, then, and especially with threshing-machines, a strong increase, except for the sowing-machines, which are being displaced by drills, about which no question was asked in 1882. In 1895 these were in use on 140,792 farms.

The home of agricultural machinery is England. It had developed machinery in industry earlier than any other country, but it also offered the best preconditions for the penetration of the machine into agriculture. Perels names these as follows: the land is almost everywhere in a high state of cultivation; the farmers are as a rule capitalists; and engineering works are numerous, almost every small town having one, so that repairs present no very great difficulties.

Besides England it was the United States that developed agricultural machinery, driven by the shortage of agricultural labourers and their demands for wages. This development was made easier by the high intelligence of the American worker, and harder by the low level of cultivation of the soil and the distance of most farms from engineering works. American agricultural machines are therefore of a different kind from the English, of much simpler and sturdier construction, but their work is not always so perfect as that of the English.

In Germany the conditions for the development of agricultural machinery are less favourable. In the west and south the land is too much parcelled out; in the east large-scale enterprise does predominate, but the standard of living and the culture of the agricultural labourers there are too low, and engineering works are too far away. Conditions are most favourable in the Province of Saxony, where we find large-scale enterprise, an intelligent working population and numerous engineering works. In the whole of Baden there is only one steam plough, in the whole of Württemberg none, whereas steam ploughs were used on 428 farms in the Province of Saxony alone. But in the rest of Germany too the machine knows how to overcome the obstacles in its way, as is proved, besides the statistics above, by the rapid growth of the manufacture of agricultural machinery. Except for steam ploughs, which England still makes better, and mowing-machines, which are largely obtained from the United States, Germany produces itself all the countless machines that agriculture needs today.

The saving of labour is not the only purpose of machinery. In agriculture it sometimes even takes second place to other purposes. It is probably most in the foreground with the threshing-machine. Many agronomists, too, such as Th. von der Goltz, ascribe to it a decisive influence on the depopulation of the countryside.

“However useful and indispensable the threshing-machine is for agricultural enterprise, its extensive use has nevertheless had a baneful effect on the conditions of rural labour. Threshing with the flail used to be the chief occupation of the agricultural labourers during the winter. Threshing by machine requires very many fewer persons; in order to have a large quantity of saleable grain as soon as possible, it is often carried out for the most part already in the autumn, especially where steam threshing is used.”

To remedy the evil von der Goltz proposes “restriction in the use of the threshing-machine, and especially of the steam threshing-machine”, apparently in the interest of the agricultural labourers, in fact in the interest of the estate-owners, for whom, as he says himself, “the disadvantage arising from this restriction is amply compensated, if not at once, then in the future, by the greater number of hands available in summer” (Die ländliche Arbeiterklasse und der preußische Staat, pp. 144, 145).

Fortunately this conservative friendship for the worker is nothing but a reactionary utopia. The threshing-machine is too profitable “at once” for the estate-owners to be willing to forgo its use for the sake of a profit “in the future”. And so it will continue to exercise its revolutionary activity; it will drive the agricultural labourers into the town, and thereby become a powerful means of raising wages in the countryside on the one side, and of furthering the further development of machinery there on the other.

As the quotation above already shows, the threshing-machine is important not only because it saves labour but also because it works far faster than human hands. This speed is of no small importance since production for the market has taken the place of production for one’s own use. Now the point is to take rapid advantage of the state of the market, and the grain producer can do this the more easily the sooner his grain is ready for market, that is, threshed. Whereas threshing used to be one of the winter tasks that occupied the countryman along with domestic industry, now, with the use of the steam threshing-machine, threshing more and more takes place in the open field immediately after the harvest, which saves the time needed for carting it in and avoids the losses of grain that always occur with some crops, rape for example, in loading and unloading. Perels, in his work on Die Bedeutung des Maschinenwesens für die Landwirthschaft, points to cases “where the considerable costs of the steam threshing-machine were paid for by a single favourable sale of the produce, made ready for market more quickly”.

With harvesting machines, still more than with the threshing-machine, their importance lies, besides the saving of labour, in the greater speed of their work. The success of the whole year’s operations depends on the outcome of the harvest. This is crowded into a few days. Every loss of time can do great damage. A machine that reduces the time taken as far as possible is of the highest value; but the saving of labour and time also makes the farmer more independent of his workers, who are most indispensable at harvest time, and who therefore make their highest demands for wages at that time and are most inclined to strike. It is significant that even farms that still have their mowing done by hand sometimes acquire mowing-machines without using them, merely to be protected against strikes. Thus Kärger tells us in his book on the Sachsengängerei that mowing-machines are to be found in the Province of Saxony on all the larger beet estates, but mainly only as a means of preventing a strike of the workers. Mowing by hand is preferred there so long as the workers are numerous and willing, since the grain, as a result of heavy manuring, is apt to be laid, which makes the machine ineffective. Since Kärger made this report (1890), however, mowing-machines have been invented that can mow laid grain as well.

But the machine does not only replace man; it performs tasks that he either cannot perform at all or can never perform so perfectly. It achieves this either by its greater precision or by its greater power.

To machines of the former kind belong the sowing-machines, the manure distributors and the grain-cleaning machines.

Seed is sown much better by machine than by hand. Machine sowing therefore displaces hand sowing even where the latter is cheaper.

The drilling and dibbling machines first made the drill and dibble culture (sowing in rows) possible on larger areas; by them results are achieved that are unattainable with broadcast sowing. “The highest yields can be obtained only by carefully executed drill sowing.” (Settegast.)

In place of winnowing with the shovel, “to which many a strictly orthodox peasant still holds today, maintaining that it gives the finest seed”, have come the grain-cleaning and seed-sorting machines, the trieurs, which remove all weed seeds and other impurities as well as damaged seeds, sort the grains by size, weight and shape, and so produce good seed and uniform, clean produce for the market.

Among the machines whose outstanding performance depends mainly on the great power they develop, the steam plough is to be named first of all. Grain does not absolutely need deep ploughing in order to thrive. Under the rule of the three-field system, therefore, ploughing was not very deep.

“Even Eckhard (1754), in his Experimentalökonomie, gives as the best depth of the furrow, according to the nature of the soil, 2½, 3 or at most 4 inches, and only as an exception, with certain kinds of soil, 5 to 6 inches. He expressly warns against working the field more deeply. Similar statements are still to be found even in H. H. Zincke’s Allgemeines ökonomisches Lexikon (5th edition, 1780).” (Th. von der Goltz, “Ackerbau”, in the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, I, p. 28.)

But when crop rotation came in, it was soon found that some of the newly grown crops, clover, potatoes and beets, did better with deeper ploughing. New ploughs were invented and the teams strengthened in order to plough deeper, and it was found that grain-growing too was favourably affected. Deep working lessens the influence of too much wet as of persistent drought. Deeply worked soil also warms up more easily than soil cultivated shallowly, and it is less favourable to weeds.

Above all, however, deep cultivation aims at placing at the disposal of the plant, for the spreading of its roots, a greater quantity than before of the soil in which it finds the conditions of its development.

In every rational farm today ploughing is much deeper than at the beginning of our century. If 4 inches was then the rule, it is now twice that, and in deep cultivation 12, 15 inches and more are reached.

“The future of our agriculture lies in deep cultivation … but to carry deep cultivation through thoroughly requires a steadier and more effective motive power than that of animals.” (Perels.) Such a motive power was supplied by the steam engine.

Perels, already quoted several times, who has perhaps done most to spread the steam plough in Germany, writes of it:

“The advantages of steam cultivation over cultivation with teams are to be sought above all in the following points:

“1. It is beyond doubt, and is disputed by no one, that the work of the steam plough is far better than that of the horse plough …

“The better work of the steam plough shows itself in a greater security of the harvest and in higher yields; this has been demonstrated wherever the steam plough has been in use for several years.

“A further advantage of the steam plough is that the working of the soil can be begun in good time and finished before the onset of late autumn. Immediately after the harvest, that is, at a time when on most farms neither workers nor teams are available for ploughing, it is possible to begin breaking up the fields. … In late autumn, when work would otherwise have to stop, the steam plough still works without considerable difficulty, so that the working of the soil can be finished before the onset of winter. This advantage of the steam plough deserves due consideration especially in regions where winter comes very early.” (Die Anwendung der Dampfkraft in der Landwirthschaft, pp. 307–309.)

If in spite of these advantages the steam plough cannot establish itself in many regions, the reason is that the obstacles to the use of the machine in agriculture mentioned above are still more effective against the steam plough than against any other machine. It cannot be used where there are considerable difficulties of terrain, where there are many large stones in the soil, on swampy fields or on small parcels. Training the workers is not easy, and repairs are needed more often; but above all its great cost stands in the way of the use of the steam plough. Steam ploughs with two locomotives cost 40,000 marks and more, those with one locomotive, which are less rational, over 30,000 marks. Their use is now made easier — as is that of steam threshing-machines — by a system of hire.

England, the home of the steam plough, also uses it most. Only at the beginning of the fifties was a practically usable steam plough produced. As late as 1867, according to the reports of the Royal Agricultural Society, steam cultivation was carried on only on 135 estates. The official inquiries at the Wolverhampton show in 1871, on the other hand, gave the result that more than 2,000 steam ploughs were already at work in England. In Germany at that time there were only 24 of them. By 1882, however, 836 farms using steam ploughs were counted, and in 1895, 1,696. On the larger farms of the Province of Saxony they are general.

On the larger estates in Austria and Hungary too the steam plough is finding increasing use.

But it is not only for ploughing, and likewise for rolling, harrowing, etc., that agriculture needs the steam engine. In threshing too it proves far superior to the horse-gin machine — not to speak of the hand-driven gin. In the Saxon beet farms, true model farms of intensive cultivation, grain, except rye, whose straw is to serve for binding, is regularly threshed with the machine driven by steam. Even among the peasants “the gin of the threshing-machine has been almost entirely replaced by the portable engine” (Kärger, op. cit., p. 13).

The steam engine also does good service as a pump in irrigation and drainage works, and finally in the preparation of cattle fodder, in steaming it, and in mills, chaff-cutters, wood-saws, etc.

Wüst declares in von der Goltz’s Handbuch der Landwirthschaft (II, p. 721): “In spite of the poor utilisation of the heat, steam power is still the cheapest power for agriculture, and one that can be used almost everywhere.”

The number of steam engines in agriculture is accordingly increasing rapidly. In Prussia there were, fixed and portable:

It can be seen that the increase in agricultural steam engines was not only enormous absolutely but also more rapid than in the other branches of industry.

Perhaps, however, electricity is destined to celebrate still greater triumphs than steam in this field too, on the one hand displacing steam from operations it has taken over, on the other replacing human and animal labour in operations that have so far remained inaccessible to steam. Where the portable engine and the wire-rope transmission cannot go, electric power can still be transmitted with ease. It can also be divided without difficulty, and it does not necessarily need coal to produce it. In regions where steam working would not pay because they are too far from coal, but which have cheap water-power, electricity can make machine ploughing profitable. The electric plough is also considerably lighter than the steam plough. “The large steam-plough engines, whose steam engines develop up to 50 horse-power, weigh up to 22 tons in working order, that is, with water and coal, while the smaller ones seldom weigh less than 14 to 16 tons.” The electric plough-carriage weighs 8 tons at 20 horse-power, 12 tons at 50 horse-power.

“The chief advantage of electric ploughs over steam ploughs is to be seen in the low weight of the former, which in some cases, where there is hilly terrain and soft soil, first makes the use of machine working for ploughing possible at all, and which moreover allows performance to be considerably increased compared with steam ploughs of the same weight.” (C. Köttgen, “Ist die Elektrotechnik nach dem heutigen Stande ihrer Entwicklung schon befähigt, mit begründeter Aussicht in den Dienst der Landwirthschaft zur Erhöhung des wirthschaftlichen Reinertrags zu treten?”, Thiels Landwirthschaftliche Jahrbücher, XXVI, nos. 4–5.)

Electricity is already being used in practice on a number of estates. A friend who is an expert tells us of an electrical installation on the estate of a M. F. Prat in the department of Tarn (France).

A waterfall that can supply 30 horse-power drives a turbine, which in turn is coupled to a dynamo. The dynamo is capable of supplying a current of 40 amperes at 375 volts. Wires run across the estate, carried on poles in the usual way. And the current is taken from these wires wherever it is needed.

So far the power is used almost exclusively for ploughing, by means of a winding motor of 18 horse-power.

Among other advantages, the availability of electric power also has this one, that the whole area of the estate can be lit electrically. This makes it possible in urgent cases, during the harvest for example, to carry on work in the fields at night as well — an advantage, it is true, more for the estate-owner than for his wage-labourers.

In Germany too estates with electrical installations are already to be found. In September of last year it was even reported from Kolberg that experiments were being made to supply sixty estates with electric power from one central station, in order to improve agricultural working and make it cheaper. But we have heard nothing of the success of these experiments.

Besides machines, field railways may also be counted among the labour-saving mechanical devices. The costs of transport play a large part in agriculture. It has to move great masses of relatively small value, manure, straw, hay, beets, potatoes, etc., over considerable distances. Building good roads costs much money and takes up much space. But even on the best farm roads the resistance of friction is still very great. Here field railways prove very advantageous. A team can easily manage four times the load on a field railway that it could move on the high road. And a field railway can be laid without preparation and without trouble even where it is impossible to build a road, across moors, ploughed fields, swampy meadows, etc. The field railway not only saves the work of teams; often it is what first makes possible the transport of larger quantities of material, without which many improvements could not be carried out.

Improvements of the land too, in their most essential part — irrigation and drainage works — belong to the mechanical aids of agriculture. In contrast to those treated so far they are age-old. In the East we find such works already in prehistoric times. But in Europe north of the Alps the improvement of land developed only meagrely under the three-field system. The climate made irrigation works unnecessary, and wet land was used as meadow; so long as there was still much new land, forest and pasture, to be brought under cultivation, the incentive was lacking for improvements in the narrower sense, and probably the labour as well. But when the population grew denser, the feudal burdens began to crush the peasant and to take from him the strength and the means for improvements. Here too it was the Revolution that first created the preconditions.

Among modern improvements drainage has become especially important: the draining of the soil by an underground network of baked clay pipes, an improvement made possible only by the advances in the manufacture of bricks and tiles. It makes the soil drier, milder and looser and makes it easier to work; it warms up more easily and more lastingly, “so that the consequences of drainage amount to a change of climate” (Hamm). In Scotland it was found that harvests on drained land were usually 10 to 14 days ahead of those on undrained land.

In England drainage has increased the gross yield of land already under cultivation by 20 to 30 per cent on average, but sometimes the increase in yield is said to have amounted to 100 to 200 per cent. Many fields first became suitable for growing cereals and fodder crops through drainage.

No less than the engineer, the chemist and the physiologist — the latter above all with the help of the microscope — have revolutionised agriculture.

Under the three-field system all livestock without exception had to make do with whatever fodder pasture and meadow happened to offer. Today the development of transport has placed countless feeding-stuffs at the disposal of agriculture: besides those the farmer grows, also those he buys, especially those that are to be had cheaply as products or residues of industry, so that he does better to plant his own land with crops other than fodder crops. Animal physiology, moreover, shows him the value of the various feeding-stuffs, and teaches him to use and prepare them suitably for the age, sex, breed and use of the animals — in which, as we have seen, the machine plays a large part — so that they keep the animals at their most productive and yield the greatest useful effect.

Plant physiology, on the other hand, acquaints him with the conditions he must offer the plant in order to obtain the richest and most lasting yields without waste of material, time and labour. Besides the mechanical working of the soil, in which, as we have seen, the machine plays a large part, what comes into consideration above all is manuring: seeing to it that the soil contains in the right proportions the soluble substances that the plant needs for its growth. Chemistry not only acquaints him with these substances; it also itself produces artificially those which the soil lacks and which the farmer could not produce on his own farm in sufficient quantity, or not without excessive cost.

Farmyard manure alone is not enough to maintain the balance of modern agriculture, which produces for the market, and for a market, moreover, that for by far the greater part no longer gives back the nutritive substances it receives.

The soil thereby becomes poorer and poorer in the mineral constituents of which cultivated plants are built up. The improved methods of cultivation, the growing of fodder crops with deeper roots, deeper ploughing, etc., did indeed increase the yield of the fields, but only through a more intensive and rapid robbery, exhaustion, of the soil.

“The fertility of the soil can indeed be considerably increased at the expense of its wealth in nutrients, with the help of the progressive physical improvement of the soil by heavy use of farmyard manure, mechanical loosening, liming, etc. In the long run, however, this procedure will affect not only the wealth of the soil but in the end its fertility as well.” (Werner.)

It is one of Liebig’s immortal services to have uncovered this fact and to have fought resolutely against the intensive robbery of the soil that the improved cultivation of the first half of our century represented. He maintained the principle that the fertility of our fields will be lasting, and indeed constantly increasing, only if we give back to them the constituents that are taken from them in the agricultural products sold on the market. The waste matter of the towns must flow back to agriculture. In his work Die Chemie in ihrer Anwendung auf Agrikultur und Physiologie (Part I, Der chemische Prozeß der Ernährung der Vegetabilien) he wrote, among other things:

“A combination of chance circumstances (the introduction of clover-growing, the discovery of guano, the introduction of the potato and manuring with gypsum) has increased the population in all the states of Europe in a proportion that does not correspond to the productive capacity of these countries and is therefore unnatural, and has raised it to a height at which, if the present system of farming remains the same, it can maintain itself only on two conditions:

“1. If by a divine miracle the fields recover the fertility of which folly and ignorance have robbed them.

“2. If beds of dung or guano are discovered of about the extent of the English coalfields.

“No sensible person will consider the realisation of these conditions probable or possible. …

“The introduction of water-closets into most of the towns of England has the result that every year the conditions for the reproduction of food for three and a half million people are irretrievably lost.

“The whole enormous quantity of manures that England imports every year flows for by far the greater part back to the sea in the rivers, and the produce raised with them is not enough to feed the increase of the population.

“The worst of it is that the same process of self-destruction is going on in all the countries of Europe, even if not on so great a scale as in England. In the great cities of the Continent the authorities spend great sums every year to put the conditions for restoring and maintaining the fertility of the fields out of the farmer’s reach.

“The preservation of the wealth and welfare of states and the progress of culture and civilisation depend on the settlement of the sewage question of the towns.” (Pp. 125, 128, 129, 153.)

Liebig first laid down these propositions half a century ago. The high value of human excrement as manure and the necessity of bringing it to agriculture have long since been recognised; but the solution of the sewage question that Liebig demanded is further off today than ever. No one has yet succeeded in inventing a system of removing human excrement from the great cities that would, without excessive cost, do justice to the requirements of hygiene and of agriculture alike. The system of sewage farms, as it exists in Berlin, seems to us the most suitable from the standpoint of hygiene of those so far introduced, since it avoids the poisoning of the rivers by the filth washed away in the sewers. But the few sewage farms that are possible beside any town can hardly be regarded as a return to agriculture of the substances taken from it. At the present level of technique the question could be solved very simply, without great cost, indeed at a profit, by the sewage-farm system for example, if the antithesis between town and country were abolished and the population spread fairly evenly over the land. But under the present mode of production that is not to be thought of.

The less success there has so far been in using the human excrement of the towns for agriculture, and the more at the same time the robbery of the soil grew through the methods of more intensive farming already mentioned and through the increase of production for the market, the more did science and practice throw themselves on a palliative for giving back to the soil the nutrients taken from it: on the invention and manufacture of artificial manures, which supply the soil with the substances it lacks for the particular crop to be grown, in a form in which they can easily be taken up by the plant. The number of these manures, often imported, often produced in factories (potash manures, phosphates and nitrogenous manures), is legion and still growing; special kinds of manure are manufactured and mixed for every kind of soil, every kind of cultivation, every kind of plant; it is thereby possible not only to maintain the wealth of the soil but to increase it to a high degree; indeed, artificial manures in some circumstances already enable the farmer to dispense entirely with the rotation of crops and with farmyard manure, to adapt the growing of his crops wholly to the requirements of the market and to devote his whole cultivated area to production for the market. In this free farming modern agriculture reaches its technical and economic peak.

But it is not only the engineering works and the chemist’s laboratory that are revolutionising agriculture, but also the optician’s workshop. We shall not go further here into the importance of spectral analysis for the discovery of a number of substances, nor into that of the polarising apparatus for the sugar industry, or of photography for the knowledge of breeds and for stock-breeding, but shall only point to the optical instrument most important for agriculture, the microscope.

“It took a long time,” says Hamm, “before the use of this instrument, indispensable today, could be made fruitful for practice as well; at present, however, its importance is generally recognised, and agriculture in particular can no longer do without it. In the present state of things the examination of the soil for its constituents must decidedly begin with the microscope. … The inner structure of plants, the nature of the cell and its contents, the form and diversity of the starch grains and other formations, first became precisely known to us through the microscope. To it we owe our knowledge of the propagation of cryptogamous plants and of the nature of the numerous fungi which, as smut or rust, as potato blight or vine mildew, etc., attack cultivated plants and often damage them to the point of yielding nothing. The distinguishing of the various textile fibres from one another, the structure of wool and hair, the discovery of numerous animal enemies of crops and creatures, such as bacteria, the wheat vibrios, teasel eelworms, beet nematodes and so on, could be achieved only by microscopic means. … The microscope renders special services in the control of seed. … In practised hands the microscope renders irreplaceable services in distinguishing the genuine from the false, seed from weed.” (Die Naturkräfte in der Landwirthschaft, pp. 142–145.)

Since Hamm wrote this (1876), the microscope has made possible one of the most important advances in agriculture through the development of bacteriology.

Thanks to these advances the farmer is able either to keep away from plants and animals a number of extremely destructive diseases — anthrax, swine erysipelas, tuberculosis, phylloxera — or to cure them, or at least to recognise them with certainty.

In the second half of the last decade it was discovered that the leguminous plants (pulses and clovers), unlike other crops, take almost their whole requirement of nitrogen not from the soil but from the air, and that they not only do not make the soil poorer in nitrogen but actually make it richer. They possess this property, however, only when certain micro-organisms are present in the soil, which settle on their roots. Where these are lacking, the leguminous plants can be enabled, by a suitable inoculation of the soil, to turn soil poor in nitrogen into soil rich in nitrogen, and so in a manner to manure it for other crops. As a rule, in combination with suitable mineral manures (phosphates and potash manures), they make it possible to take the highest yields from the soil permanently without farmyard manure. Only through this discovery has free farming gained a completely secure foundation.

What a revolution, from the three-field system of the feudal era to the free farming of the end of the nineteenth century! And by far the greater part of this revolution is confined to a few decades! Liebig’s pioneering investigations date only from 1840, and were generally recognised only in the fifties, at about the same time as the steam engine made its entry into agriculture and bacteriology achieved its first practical successes for it (1837, the discovery of the bacillus of the spotted disease of silkworms and of the fungi of fermentation; 1849, of the anthrax bacillus).

Within a few decades agriculture, formerly the most conservative of all occupations, which for a thousand years showed almost no progress at all, and within that period for centuries absolutely none, has become one of the most revolutionary, if not the most revolutionary, of modern occupations. But in the same measure as it was revolutionised it also developed from a craft, whose routine was handed down from father to son, into a science, or rather into a complex of sciences that are rapidly widening in the extent of their material and of their theoretical insight. The farmer who is not at home in these sciences, the mere “practical man”, stands helpless and perplexed before every innovation, and yet he cannot stick to the old ways, for it has become impossible simply to go on farming in the tried manner of fathers and grandfathers.

The development of agriculture into a science shows itself clearly in the history of agricultural education, especially of the colleges. It is not only in the extent and content of what is taught that this development can be followed; the outward history of the agricultural colleges also bears clear witness to the progress of scientific agronomy.

Thaer, who studied the improved English agriculture at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, and sought to give it a scientific foundation and to naturalise it in Germany, was the first to recognise the necessity of special institutions for agricultural education. As early as 1798, in his work Einleitung zur Kenntniß der englischen Landwirthschaft, he advocated the “idea of establishing an academy of agriculture”, and a few years later he founded the first such academy (in 1802 at Celle, then in 1804 at Möglin), which others followed in the next decades, the first being that of Hohenheim in Württemberg, in 1818. Each of these agricultural colleges was connected with a model farm, and so was situated in the country. Only in this way was it possible to give the students, besides “grey theory”, the indispensable practical demonstration of the application of the theory. For the number of rationally managed estates was still small at that time.

That changed in the course of the first half of our century, not least under the influence of these colleges themselves. A considerable number of the larger estates went over to a rational system of management organised on scientific principles, and the young farmer was no longer dependent on the model farm of the college for studying the application of the theory.

But in the same measure as the number of rationally managed estates increased, the matter of agricultural teaching widened and deepened in consequence of the revolutions indicated above in mechanics, chemistry and physiology and in general economic and social conditions. Agricultural teaching at college level called for ever more scientific aids, ever more auxiliary sciences, an ever higher intellectual atmosphere; the colleges isolated in the countryside became more and more inadequate to the growing tasks that confronted them.

In this field too Liebig led the way. As President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences he gave an address at Munich in 1861 in which he exposed most sharply the inadequacy of the agricultural academies situated in the country and demanded that they be moved to the university towns. Over this demand there arose a controversy almost as passionate as that over Liebig’s theory of the wealth and exhaustion of the soil. But in this case as in that the great scholar emerged victorious from the discussion, and his demand has been met everywhere. With the exception of Hohenheim, all the agricultural colleges today are in university towns, not only in Germany but also in Austria, France, Italy, etc., either as parts of the universities or as independent colleges (in Berlin, Vienna and Paris).

Agriculture taught in the great city! That is surely the most drastic illustration of the fact that agriculture has fallen into complete dependence on the town in every respect, that the progress of agriculture comes from the towns.

But of course the farmer must not content himself with his university knowledge alone. If it would be ridiculous today to apply to agriculture the saying that trying is better than studying, it would be just as ridiculous to suppose that studying alone is enough. More even than in industry, the rule here is to study and to try, for the reality in which the theory is to be applied is far more varied and complicated in agriculture than in industry. The farmer must make experiments and gather experience; but above all he must keep a constant clear view of every part of his many-sided field, and that is possible only through exact and rational book-keeping.

The farmer of the three-field system, who produced mainly for his own needs, did not need it. Conditions were then essentially the same for every farm in a given district, the same as in the days of his forefathers, simple and transparent. It is quite otherwise with modern agriculture. It has to deal with more extensive, more varied and constantly changing conditions, conditions of production and circulation, of purchase and sale. Without exact and regular book-keeping it falls into hopeless confusion. This holds for every larger enterprise of the modern mode of production, but to a still higher degree for agriculture than for industry. A modern industrial enterprise produces only articles of one kind, whereas a landed estate is a combination of the most varied partial enterprises — livestock, arable, vegetable garden, orchard, poultry-yard, etc. — which supply the most varied articles. The industrial enterprise as a rule buys all its means of production and sells all its products; with the agricultural enterprise that is probably never the case: it buys only part of its means of production and produces another part itself; livestock, fodder, manure and seed are partly bought and partly produced on the estate; wages are partly money wages and partly wages in kind. Correspondingly, only part of the products is brought to market and sold, and part is consumed in the enterprise itself. Finally, the effects of a means or method of production are not so easy to survey in agriculture as in industry. Sometimes it takes years before they show themselves clearly on every side. All this makes book-keeping indispensable to the farmer: exact and regular book-keeping extending to the smallest details; book-keeping organised not only from commercial but also from scientific points of view; for the farmer has to do not only with capital and the profit on capital but also with land and ground-rent; and ground-rent, so far as it is differential rent, depends on the wealth of the soil; to preserve that wealth undiminished, and if possible to increase it, must be as much the task of the modern rational farmer as to employ his capital as profitably as possible.

Nothing perhaps characterises modern agriculture better than this book-keeping built on scientific as much as on commercial considerations. The close union of science and business that is peculiar to the whole modern mode of production shows itself nowhere so clearly as in agriculture. It is the only occupation whose book-keeping is taught at the universities.