Agriculture, also called farming or husbandry, is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi, and other life forms for food, fiber, biofuel, medicinals and other products used to sustain and enhance human life. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the development of civilization. The study of agriculture is known as agricultural science. The history of agriculture dates back thousands of years, and its development has been driven and defined by greatly different climates, cultures, and technologies. However, all farming generally relies on techniques to expand and maintain the lands that are suitable for raising domesticated species. For plants, this usually requires some form of irrigation, although there are methods of dryland farming. Livestock are raised in a combination of grassland-based and landless systems, in an industry that covers almost one-third of the world's ice- and water-free area. In the developed world, industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture has become the dominant system of modern farming, although there is growing support for sustainable agriculture, including permaculture and organic agriculture.
Until the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of the human population labored in agriculture. Pre-industrial agriculture was typically subsistence agriculture/self-sufficiency in which farmers raised most of their crops for their own consumption instead of cash crops for trade. A remarkable shift in agricultural practices has occurred over the past century in response to new technologies, and the development of world markets. This also has led to technological improvements in agricultural techniques, such as the Haber-Bosch method for synthesizing ammonium nitrate which made the traditional practice of recycling nutrients with crop rotation and animal manure less important.
Modern agronomy, plant breeding, agrochemicals such as pesticides and fertilizers, and technological improvements have sharply increased yields from cultivation, but at the same time have caused widespread ecological damage and negative human health effects. Selective breeding and modern practices in animal husbandry have similarly increased the output of meat, but have raised concerns about animal welfare and the health effects of the antibiotics, growth hormones, and other chemicals commonly used in industrial meat production. Genetically modified organisms are an increasing component of agriculture, although they are banned in several countries. Agricultural food production and water management are increasingly becoming global issues that are fostering debate on a number of fronts. Significant degradation of land and water resources, including the depletion of aquifers, has been observed in recent decades, and the effects of global warming on agriculture and of agriculture on global warming are still not fully understood.
The major agricultural products can be broadly grouped into foods, fibers, fuels, and raw materials. Specific foods include cereals (grains), vegetables, fruits, oils, meats and spices. Fibers include cotton, wool, hemp, silk and flax. Raw materials include lumber and bamboo. Other useful materials are produced by plants, such as resins, dyes, drugs, perfumes, biofuels and ornamental products such as cut flowers and nursery plants. Over one third of the world's workers are employed in agriculture, second only to the services' sector, although the percentages of agricultural workers in developed countries has decreased significantly over the past several centuries.
In addition to the articles listed below, agriculture is discussed in a number of other articles. Domesticationdescribes the early history. Other aspects of the social structure of agriculturalists are discussed in Community, article on Community development; Manorial economy; rural society; and Village. Other aspects of the economy of agriculture are discussed under Communism, economic organization of; Credit; Famine; Food; Land; Land tenure; and Plantations.
I COMPARATIVE TECHNOLOGY
There are several ways of comparing the agricultural economy of one region with that of another. It can be done in terms of crop distributions, or relative productivity, or the effect on the rural landscape. The method used here will be a classification of agricultural practice in terms of the basic method or technology by which the farmer tackles the job of wresting crops from the earth.Agricultural technology, as it functions in various natural settings, not only influences crop patterns, productivity, and the landscape, but also affects population density, possibilities for trade and urbanization, and social structure.
If we look around the world and attempt to plot on a map the varying techniques with which different societies face the fundamental tasks of cultivation, we are bound to be struck by the existence, over wide areas containing many millions of people, of relatively unsophisticated techniques that seem to be survivals from an age which the more sophisticated societies have left far behind. There are today but few regions where these unsophisticated techniques are entirely unaffected by new ideas that have spread with modern trade and commerce from those countries with early experience of agrarian revolution (as defined below). The degree of penetration by these new ideas varies widely, however, from place to place.
The agricultural systems of the world may be considered in terms of the following very broad categories, which may, as will be seen, be further subdivided (in some cases using criteria other than technology): (1) shifting cultivation; (2) simple sedentary cultivation with hand tools; (3) simple plow cultivation; (4) cultivation dominated by the effects of the agrarian revolution.
Shifting cultivation
Shifting cultivation is a system under which temporary clearings are made, usually but not invariably in forest country, and cultivated for a short period of years before being allowed to revert to natural vegetation while the cultivator moves on to a succession of new clearings. Typically, the period for which any one patch is in cultivation is a good deal shorter than the period for which it is allowed to lie fallow under naturally regenerating vegetation.Shifting cultivation as just defined is the dominant agricultural system over wide areas of the earth’s surface. Most of these areas are within the tropics, notably in the Amazon Basin and adjacent areas of South America, in most regions of intertropical Africa, in a number of remote jungle areas in India, in most of the less populated parts of both peninsular and insular southeast Asia, in the highland areas of Manchuria and Korea, and in aboriginal southwest China. This system of agriculture was formerly widespread in many parts of Europe, notably in northwest Spain and in the Black Forest and other forested highland regions of central Europe; survivals may still be encountered. Possibly something like 200 million people, occupying 14 million square miles, are engaged in shifting cultivation.
In addition to the impermanence of cultivation and to the system of “bush-fallow” already mentioned, many but not all systems of shifting cultivation also involve other characteristic traits, notably clearing by slashing and burning the forest or other vegetation (leaving stumps and often bigger trees), and cultivation by hoe, dibble, or digging stick but not by plow.
Perhaps because in western and central Europe shifting cultivation has receded in the face of more advanced techniques of cultivation, there has been a tendency to see it as a primitive method of land use that ought to be replaced or even forbidden. Foresters tend to be particularly hostile to it, because of its undeniably destructive effect on vegetation—shifting cultivators usually (although not always) prefer high forest to low jungle or scrub because under high forest conditions there tends to be a higher humus content and higher fertility. It should be noted, however, that foresters in a number of tropical countries have exploited a system first developed in Burma, the so-called taungya system, under which shifting cultivators are allowed to cultivate clearings on condition that when they abandon them they replant the forest in the form of teak. Hostility to shifting cultivation also springs from those who see it as a cause of soil erosion, particularly when it is practiced on steep slopes—as it is, for example, in Orissa (India) and in the hill tracts behind Chittagong (Pakistan). There can be no doubt that erosion is accelerated in such circumstances. It is worth noting, however, that some shifting cultivators deliberately choose slopes rather than flatter land because it is the former that, under tropical conditions, tend to have the less mature (and therefore less leached and more fertile) soil. There can also be no doubt that shifting cultivation, notably in parts of Africa and Indonesia, has degraded the natural vegetation from forest to grassland.
In a broader sense, too, shifting cultivation may often be seen as an adaptation to tropical soil conditions under which continuous cultivation may be highly dangerous in the absence of advanced techniques for conserving soil and maintaining soil fertility; under such circumstances it may be preferable to cultivate for a year or two and to abandon the plot before too much damage is done to the soil (although in point of fact it is often the impossibility of controlling weeds with hand tools alone, rather than diminished fertility, that drives the cultivator off his plot). It is significant, in this connection, that European settlers in Brazil have, in some areas, taken to a form of shifting cultivation.
It is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to say of all systems of shifting cultivation whether they are in equilibrium with their environment or destructive of it; in many cases more research is needed. A clearer definition of the problem is required because of the wide range of practices, all subsumed in the term “shifting cultivation.” Conklin (1961), for example, shows that “swiddens” (clearings made by shifting cultivators) may or may not be worked with hoes, may or may not be fenced, may be worked from temporary huts or permanent villages, and vary enormously in such features as methods of clearing and duration of fallow. (In this last connection it is important to emphasize that in many regions, notably in west Africa and parts of India and Ceylon, the pressure of population and the demands of cash cropping are such that the period of regeneration between successive periods of cultivation grows shorter and shorter, sometimes until it even disappears altogether. In the absence of techniques of manuring and soil conservation the result is usually the degradation of the soil.) Conklin goes on to point out the merits of “a combined ethnographical and ecological approach” to the study of shifting cultivation and the rarity with which this approach has hitherto been followed.
G. J. A. Terra (1958), writing on southeast Asia with special reference to Indonesia, demonstrates a wide variety of practice among shifting cultivators (who, however, have tended to become sedentary, especially in Java). Thus in Bangka, Billiton, and Minahassa, as well as Halmahera and many other islands of the Moluccas, shifting cultivators have no cattle and depend almost entirely on plots planted with the dibble; but a system of even wider distribution (e.g., in many parts of Sumatra, in southern Celebes, and in the Lesser Sundas) involves shifting cultivation by people who also own cattle and among whom cattle ownership, as in eastern and southern Africa, confers status.
R. F. Watters (1960) also records the wide variety of practice covered by the term “shifting cultivation” and distinguishes a number of major types. He brings out an important point that is often overlooked: shifting cultivation is in a number of areas practiced by people who are perfectly well aware of methods of sedentary cultivation, but use shifting cultivation for a particular category of land. For example, shifting cultivation is practiced in the unirrigable “highlands” in the dry zone of Ceylon, a country where irrigated rice and coconuts are grown respectively in permanent fields on irrigable land and on land with a permanently high water table. In northern Burma, again, culturally identical peoples practice, on the one hand, terraced rice cultivation of hill slopes in areas of high population density, and, on the other, shifting cultivation of similar slopes where population density is low (Leach 1959).
There is, in fact, a close connection between shifting cultivation and low population density: beyond a critical density (which varies with local conditions) the period of regeneration allowed to the natural vegetation becomes too short, and deterioration tends to set in unless the cultivators adopt some of the techniques by which sedentary cultivators manage to cultivate the same field year in and year out. This is one way by which the transition from shifting to sedentary cultivation may be effected; another is the planting of commercial crops, especially permanent tree crops, in abandoned clearings by shifting cultivators (the rubber grown in Sumatra is a good example).
Simple sedentary cultivation with hand tools
It does not follow, however, that all simple sedentary cultivation (that is, for present purposes, sedentary cultivation without recourse to the plow) represents the fixation of shifting cultivation. In southeast Asia, for example, it may well be that the most ancient surviving form of cultivation is the use of permanent gardens to grow bananas, various tubers such as Dioscorea yams and taro (Colocasia esculenta), and tree crops such as the coconut and, less frequently, the sago palm. Carl O. Sauer (1952) believes that this was the earliest of all forms of cultivation. It survives as the sole form of land use in remote Indonesian islands like the Mentawai Islands; and something very like it provides the basic system in Polynesia, where it survives (e.g., in Fiji) in the form of specially prepared and irrigated taro beds. In all these cases, except where modern influences have prevailed, cultivation is by digging stick or, less commonly, by hoe. Fertility in tuber gardens is maintained by a rest period. Tree crops can, of course, be permanent, for trees bring nutriment up from lower horizons of the soil and protect the earth from erosion; they are therefore relatively easy to maintain in equilibrium with the environment—provided the climate is suitable—though yields are often very low indeed in the absence of pest control and fertilizers.The mixed garden (containing both tree crops and a wide variety of vegetables) that is so characteristic of much of the rice-growing regions of southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent may be regarded as a special development from the system just described.
In many parts of Africa south of the Sahara “women’s gardens” are to be found immediately around the village. In them vegetables, bananas, and other crops are grown by hand tillage on a more or less permanent basis. The gardens are kept fertile by means of manure from goats, chickens, and the villagers themselves, together with household refuse and ashes.
The agricultural systems of the Inca in pre-Columbian America and of their latter-day successors represent a fine example of sedentary but plowless agriculture in part dependent on irrigation and the terracing of steep slopes.
It must be recognized, however, that it would be extremely difficult to draw a map of the world and to plot on it all examples of the land-use technique currently under discussion and, in particular, to identify all existing cases of the fixation of cultivation in areas traditionally devoted to shifting cultivation. Much more work on this problem is needed.
Simple plow cultivation
It will be appreciated that two of the basic problems that confront the sedentary cultivator are the maintenance of soil fertility and the control of weeds. If fertility cannot be maintained fields must be periodically abandoned, and the cultivation is no longer truly sedentary; if weeds proliferate too extensively (as in the chena, the patch of the Ceylonese shifting cultivator), the same applies. The use of even the simple wooden plow goes a long way toward the solution of both problems. The ability of the plowman to cover at least some of his weeds, and thus to kill them, also adds to the humus in the soil. The deeper and more systematic cultivation made possible by the plow tends to bring to the surface plant-nutrients taken down by percolating rainfall and to improve soil structure; the presence of draft animals to pull the plow at least gives the possibility of stall-feeding and hence systematic manuring—a possibility that is unfortunately not always realized in practice.Over a vast area stretching from the Mediterranean and the Balkans to the Japanese archipelago, and from central Asia to Ceylon, agricultural technology is still dominated by a simple, traditional plow culture, only marginally affected by the agrarian revolution and those other developments that have transformed the agriculture of such regions as western Europe, North America, and Australia. The vast populations of India, China, and the Middle East depend for their food supply on traditional methods of sedentary tillage using the types of wooden plow handed down from remote generations.
Within this great cultural region there may be recognized a number of subcultures, separated on grounds of technology and associated crop pattern.
In the Middle East, from Afghanistan and Iran to Egypt, one can recognize a belt of plow cultures, perhaps the most ancient of all, where animaldrawn plows appeared much before 3000 B.C. It is characterized, among other things, by a reliance on irrigation of a wide variety of types, from the ancient and modern systems dependent on the Nile to the ingenious tunnels (karez) of Iran and the multitudinous devices used by the oasis dweller. In this area, too, the terracing of hill slopes is in many places a highly developed traditional technique.
The lands around the Mediterranean, with their highly distinctive climate and cultural history, also form a subregion within the belt of plow cultures. The most characteristic and traditional technology hinges on a twofold system of land use: the fields, traditionally growing the staple cereal crops, wheat and barley, and in some places irrigated; and the hillside plantations of vines and olives, figs, and other tree crops. Everywhere (especially in the south of France, in Italy, and in Israel) traditional methods are, however, being rapidly replaced by more specialized cultivation under the impact of commerce and of the agrarian revolution.
In the Balkan peninsula and in certain geographical pockets in western, central, and northern Europe one reaches what may, for convenience and brevity, be regarded as the cool temperate variant of traditional plow culture—the cultivation, using oxen or horses as draft animals, of wheat and barley in favorable places, and of oats and rye in wetter and cooler places, with a fair range of ancillary crops. Here are European peasant societies still relatively unaffected by the agrarian revolution: but the word “relatively” is used advisedly, for almost everywhere today, under the impact of modern communications or commerce, and of institutional changes in communist countries, the old order is vanishing and the transition to a more modern agricultural technology and economy is being effected, here slowly, there more rapidly. Some of the largest agglomerations of population depend on an association of the plow and of other simple animal-drawn tools (harrows, leveling boards, and the like) with irrigated (or, at any rate, flooded-field) rice cultivation. This subculture covers much of Ceylon, southern India, Bengal, and Assam, the deltas of mainland southeast Asia, Java, Sumatra, the Philippines, and southern China and Japan. The total area under “wet” rice (as distinct from “dry” rice grown by shifting or rudimentary sedentary cultivation) exceeds 200 million acres, and rice forms the staple food of well over half the world’s people. Rice is a remarkable crop in other ways too. Because it exists in so many varieties it can be grown under widely varying conditions, from brackish or even saline soils to deeply flooded deltas like those of Thailand and South Vietnam. In many places, given enough water, it can supply two crops on the same land each year. And—a very important point —it can give worthwhile yields on the same land year after year for generations without manuring, although, of course, yields may be greatly increased by the judicious use of manure; dry crops under similar conditions tend, in the tropics at any rate, to give declining yields that may well stabilize at an uneconomic level. The reasons for this valuable property of wet rice are probably to be sought in such factors as the nutrients and clay minerals brought in by irrigation water and the lower temperatures preserved by flooding, which, with anaerobic conditions for much of the year, lower the rate of oxidation and loss of nutrients of vegetable matter. Just as irrigated wheat cultivation historically became identified with the rise of many sociocultural institutions of Western civilization, so with rice cultivation goes a whole way of life, a whole type of civilization, together with the possibility of supporting dense populations for centuries, if not for millennia.
Among the populations supported by plow cultivation of rice there are, not surprisingly, many variations in agricultural economy and technology. Some rice cultivators have highly developed techniques of terracing hillsides and of controlling water in the terraces (e.g., in the hills of Ceylon, in Java, and in the interior of Luzon); others tackle land that is almost flat (e.g., in southern Thailand and in the Malay Peninsula). Again, some rice cultivators, as in China, employ almost incredible ingenuity in seeing that every scrap of waste organic matter finds its way back to the soil—indeed, their technology tends to be intensive gardening rather than plow culture—whereas others, in regions that until recently felt but little pressure of population, use no manure at all except under the modern pressure exerted by a cash economy and by government agencies (e.g., in lowland Ceylon).
North and west of the great rice-growing areas of India and China, in the dry plateaus of the Deccan and the great Indo-Gangetic plains, and the loesslands and delta of the mighty but dangerous Hwang Ho, are other large populations of farmers, densely settled in fertile plains, less densely (but still thickly by American standards) in rockier plateaus with thinner soils. These form two more subcultures, as it were, of the great Old World belt of plow cultures, devoted to millets, wheat, oilseeds, sugar cane, and cotton rather than to rice and its ancillaries. The north Indian peasant tends to have less intensive techniques and lower yields than his north Chinese counterpart, although in India the situation is changing (albeit rather patchily) and China, of course, feels the impact of the communist agrarian measures.
The agrarian revolution
In Europe, agricultural developments of the last three hundred years have wrought such changes in technology and economy that they demand separate, though necessarily summary, treatment. The source of the changes concerned lies, of course, in the agrarian revolution in the widest sense of that term, including not only technical changes but changes in conditions of land holding. A whole complex of developments is thus involved, including the replacement of fallowing with constant tillage; the introduction of new crops and of new breeds of animals; the effects of evolving communications on the specialization of agricultural production; structural change in the agrarian system (evolutionary in the West, revolutionary in Russia); and, more recently, the impact of modern science and engineering as seen in mechanization, pest and disease control, artificial fertilizers, and the evolution of strains of crop suited to particular conditions and resistant to specific diseases. One has only to compare a modern farm in, say, East Anglia (England) or the United States with a peasant holding in India or Egypt to see the contrast. Yet an increasing number of peasant holdings in India and in Egypt are feeling some of the effects of the revolution in question. In both countries, for instance, the peasant may have a very small holding and be cultivating it with a wooden plow and draft animals that have changed little since the time of Ashoka or of the pharaohs; but in both countries he may well be growing, for a distant market, an American variety of cotton developed by scientific genetic research.It would be difficult to attempt a description of all the types of agricultural technology or of cropping patterns that have emerged and are constantly evolving from the revolutionary changes just mentioned, even if the requisite data were everywhere available. One or two salient characteristics may, however, be highlighted and one or two technological subtypes enumerated. One of the outstanding characteristics of modern agriculture—whether in land of comparatively new settlement such as North America, Argentina, or Australia, or in older agricultural areas such as western Europe—is the high and mounting degree of mechanization, characterized first by new plows, harvesters, and other implements drawn by horses, and then by tractordrawn implements and self-propelled machines like the combine harvester or the rotary tiller. Originally a response mainly to the need for constant tillage, weed control, and other desiderata of the earlier agrarian reformers, the movement toward mechanization has been vastly stimulated by the existence in lands of new settlement of enormous areas of virgin soil combined with a great dearth of labor. The relationship between mechanization and the relative abundance of land and of labor seems to be forgotten by those who advocate wholesale mechanization in underdeveloped and over-populated countries. Wholesale mechanization of Indian agriculture would, for example, merely swell to uncontrollable numbers the already large army of rural unemployed or grossly underemployed, at the same time reducing yields per acre where at present, as in parts of Madras State, the intensive application of hand methods gives phenomenal yields, in this case of rice. The answer would appear to be selective mechanization of processes such as plowing hard-caked soil, impossible under present methods, or of processes handicapped, despite the over-all surplus of labor, by seasonal shortage—for example, weeding the standing paddy crop. In western Europe and elsewhere, mechanization has been associated with a drift of labor from the land into other occupations and often into towns, and with a decline in the proportion of the national labor force engaged in cultivation to a figure that sounds unbelievable to, say, Indian ears.
Another outstanding characteristic of modern agricultural technology is the breeding of new varieties of crops. These new varieties have in some cases revolutionized agricultural geography; for example, it seems probable that none of the lands in the United States west of the Mississippi would be growing wheat today if the only available varieties were those brought by the Pilgrim Fathers. The poleward and desertward march of agriculture is a feature of our times, but it carries with it its own dangers—notably of soil erosion in the case of the extension of cultivation toward and into arid regions.
Monoculture
An outstanding characteristic of modern agriculture is its high degree of specialization. Most African farmers would find it very hard to understand the agricultural methods of, say, a Wiltshire (England) dairy farmer, who produces nothing but liquid milk, of which he consumes only a few pints a day, and who must buy everything else he needs, including even milk products like butter and cheese. It is, of course, the rise of urban and industrial markets, the spread of modern communications, and the development of an exchange economy that have, with changes in methods of production, brought about the world of specialized agricultural production in which we live. Wheat farming in the Canadian prairies, cocoa farming in Ghana, citrus planting in Israel, truck farming in Florida, and cotton production in Russian central Asia are a few examples out of thousands that might be cited. The modern farmer chooses his crop not by applying a traditional technology and a limited range of crop choices to local natural conditions but by watching the market (often distorted, or at any rate affected, by state action). But the farmer still flouts natural conditions at his peril, as those in the dust bowls of the 1930s found to their cost. Monoculture in particular carries grave perils—not only of declining fertility, but of diseases that spread like wildfire when they find ready victims of the same species, or even variety, for mile after mile across country.One of the most familiar examples of monocultural techniques is the tropical plantation—of tea in Ceylon, of rubber on the Malay Peninsula, of sisal in Tanganyika, and so on. Originally these large units of production, opened up by means of imported capital, often operated by imported labor, and working for distant markets, stood in stark contrast to minuscule local peasant holdings: hence (in part) the theory of the “dual economy,” two contrasting economies side by side in the same area. But in many countries today—notably in Ceylon—local capital and enterprise is active in the plantations, and small holders and peasants are planting the crops once almost entirely confined to the large alien holdings. In other countries, for example Indonesia, the plantation is seen as an alien, colonialist intrusion, and is on the way out.
Conclusions
It cannot be denied that, taking the world picture as a whole, the shifting cultivator, the plowless sedentary cultivator, and the traditional plow cultivator are retreating before the advance of modern commercial agriculture; to be more precise, elements of the modern agricultural technology and of modern agricultural organization are penetrating the formerly almost static world of traditional agriculture. It may be in the form of a new crop (for example, the spectacular spread of manioc—Manihot utilissima—from the New World tropics to almost all parts of the Old World tropics); or the use of artificial fertilizer; or a new system of green manuring. It may be the addition of a steel tip and mold board to a traditional wooden plow, or the development of truck farming, or heavy emphasis on a commercial crop such as cocoa in Ghana or rubber in Malaya.But this is not to say that all the features of the more ancient agricultural economies are about to disappear, still less that they ought to disappear. There is great danger in the wholesale transplantation of an agricultural technology from one environment to another—witness the spectacular failure of the scheme for mechanized production of groundnuts in Tanganyika. And the dangers are not only physical dangers, dangers to soil and plant cover. There are also grave social dangers. The effects of wholesale and indiscriminate mechanization on an overpopulated society have already been discussed. It is always useful, and often essential, to start from the assumption that a long-standing system of agricultural technology represents an adaptation to local physical and social conditions, albeit at a lower technical level and sometimes in terms of past social conditions, especially where the population/land ratio is concerned.
There is much research to be done everywhere on the relationships involved. Only when there is an understanding of the existing system can changes safely be introduced or adapted.
B. H. Farmer
[See alsoLand tenure. Other relevant material may be found inAsian society, article onsoutheast asia.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Conklin, Harold C. 1961 The Study of Shifting Cultivation. Current Anthropology 2:27–61. → A bibliography appears on pages 35–59.Curwen, Eliot C.; and Hatt, Gudmund (1946–1953) 1953 Plough and Pasture: The Early History of Farming. New York: Schuman. → Part 1: Prehistoric Farming of Europe and the Near East, by Eliot C. Curwen. Part 2: Farming of Non-European Peoples, by Gudmund Hatt. Part 1 was published in 1946 as Plough and Pasture.
Dumont, RenÉ (1954) 1957 Types of Rural Economy: Studies in World Agriculture. New York: Praeger. → First published as Économie agricole dans le monde.
Faucher, Daniel 1949 Géographic agraire: Types de cultures. Paris: Librairie de Médicis.
Forde, C. Daryll (1934) 1963 Habitat, Economy and Society: A Geographic Introduction to Ethnology. London: Methuen.
George, Pierre 1956 La campagne: Le fait rural à travers le monde. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Gourou, Pierre (1947) 1964 The Tropical World: Its Social and Economic Conditions and Its Future Status. 3d ed. New York: Wiley. → First published as Les pays tropicaux: Principes d’une géographic humaine et économique.
Grist, Donald H. (1953) 1959 Rice. 3d ed. London: Longmans.
King, Franklin H. (1911) 1927 Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. New York: Harcourt.
Leach, Edmund R. 1959 Some Economic Advantages of Shifting Cultivation. Volume 7, pages 64–66 in Pacific Science Congress, Ninth, Bangkok, 1957, Proceedings. Bangkok: Secretariat, Ninth Pacific Science Congress.
Sauer, Carl O. 1952 Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. New York: American Geographical Society.
Siegfried, AndrÉ; (1943) 1947 The Mediterranean. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce. → First published as Vue générale de la Méditerranée.
Terra, G. J. A. 1958 Farm Systems in Southeast Asia. Netherlands Journal of Agricultural Science 6:157–182.
Warriner, Doreen (1939) 1965 The Economics of Peasant Farming. 2d ed. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Watters, R. F. 1960 The Nature of Shifting Cultivation: A Review of Recent Research. Pacific Viewpoint 1:59–99.
Weulersse, Jacques 1946 Paysans de Syrie et du Proche-Orient. Paris: Gallimard.
Whittlesey, Derwent S. 1936 Major Agricultural Regions of the Earth. Association of American Geographers, Annals 26:199–240.
Wittfogel, Karl A. 1957 Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press. → A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Yale University Press.
II SOCIAL ORGANIZATION
Agriculture-related social action is typically organized through such groupings as the following: the family, which is both a producing and consuming unit, as is also the large estate, such as the manor, the hacienda, the cooperative farm, or the collective; work teams of various composition; associations organized for such purposes as irrigation, drainage, marketing, and purchasing; and related systems from which issue such services as education and religion. The student of agricultural organization is interested in the relationships that compose these units, the relations of these units to one another, and their relationships or linkages to larger pluralities, such as the society and nation and their various subsystems.The pursuit of such knowledge is impeded by the following factors. First, there is a lack of adequate historical records. A second problem is the vagueness of the term “agricultural organization” and the lack of specificity in its use. If all activities related to agriculture are included, as in the case of “agribusiness,” a sizable proportion of the population may be involved, even in an industrialized nation (for example, 30-40 per cent of the United States labor force); if only those engaged in farming are included, the proportions, especially in industrialized nations, will be much smaller (for example, 12 per cent of the United States labor force). The incomparability of unlikes is also a problem: a farm run by a nuclear family cannot be effectively compared with a hacienda run by hundreds of people. Outwardly similar units may be rendered incomparable by fundamentally different forms of tenure, distribution of power, and extent of status-role differentiation. Finally, ideological differences complicate the study of agricultural organization. For example, the idealization of the peasant family form of agriculture under the German Nazis and similar groups leads to a different viewpoint than that arrived at by the communists, whose view of agriculture is essentially pragmatic. Studies of agriculture undertaken by the Nazi government revealed that familysized farms, as compared to large estates, yielded as much or more of all crops to the market (per unit of land), as well as more human beings; more “cannon fodder” was often the interpretation of this phenomenon by those of different ideological persuasion. Also, the persistent belief that social stability and military strength, viewed as national needs, can be maintained only by a large and prosperous rural population, is an a priori point of view that is not conducive to objectivity.
The typological approach
Almost from the beginning of sociology, concepts that have facilitated the ordering of social action on and between ideal or constructed poles (often called “types”) have been employed in the analysis of many forms of organization, particularly in the case of agricultural organization. Probably the most generally used of these types are Ferdinand Tönnies’ concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (1887), which arose from their author’s familiarity with both agricultural and nonagricultural organizations. The essence of the Gesellschaft-like organization (such as a factory or army) is the all-important, functionally specific goal (such as profits for the factory or winning a battle for the army) shared by the actors; in the pursuit of that goal, facilities and means, including human relationships, are used in a manner that is instrumental, efficient, and economical. The opposite of the Gesellschaft-like organization is “farming as a way of life” carried on for its own sake. The greater the tendency for agricultural organization to be a “way of life,” the less functionally specific are both goals and norms and the more Gemeinschaft-like the organization will be. The essence of Gemeinschaft-like organization and the social relations that compose it is the goal of furthering and maintaining the social relations themselves, which are never subordinated to functionally specific goals. Gemeinschaft-like organizations typically give high priority to the communication of sentiment for effective goal attainment. Status roles, rank, and power tend to be allocated by such ascriptive factors as sex and age in Gemeinschaft-like organizations, whereas these are typically allocated by achievement—demonstrated or potential—in the Gesellschaft-like organizations.Such polar types (which are not to be confused with classificatory concepts, with variables, or with models) represent dimensions that do not exist in the real world—a fact that does not reduce their analytical utility. There probably is no organization, for example, all of whose members always place goal achievement above any consideration for social relationships, as is typified in the pure Gesellschaft. Similarly, there probably is no organization all of whose members always subordinate instrumental goals to make only the relationship, such as love, revenge, or friendship, an end in itself, as is typified in the pure Gemeinschaft. Determinative system theory, such as is employed in physics, often cannot utilize ideal types, which are of greatest use in the preliminary exploration of the general nature of phenomena. Among the most useful types are local versus cosmopolitan, traditional versus modern, folk versus urban, primary versus nonprimary, and the trilogy—familistic, contractual, and compulsory [seecommunity-society continua; see also Tönnies 1887].
The processual–structural approach
Certain general processual patterns may be noted as one traces the development of man’s effort to produce more and better food and fiber with minimum effort. Different as is primitive agriculture from the sequential stages of technological advance now culminated in the agriculture of urbanized Western society, certain common elements and processes are apparent at all stages. One way of approaching the analysis of these general patterns is by specification of the elements and processes observed to be common to all social systems (Loomis 1960, pp. 1–47, especially fig. 1, p. 8). The following discussion of agricultural organization will be guided by this approach and reinforced by use of concepts from the Gemeinschaft—Gesellschaft typology.Up to the time of the industrial revolution, relationships in agricultural organization were almost universally Gemeinschaft-like, and kinship ties were of utmost importance. Child-parent relations in the family or extensions of such patterns to the feudal manor controlled by a surrogate father or lord (patron) were evaluated most highly—so highly that they were ends in and of themselves and diffused with intense sentiment. In Gemeinschaft-like agricultural organizations, processes such as that of allocation of status roles, rank, and power conformed to age-old patterns, and the actors observed norms that specified action for every possible exigency (Loomis 1960, pp. 57–118, especially fig. 2, p. 61). The principle of ascription, or who the actor was, was followed, rather than that of achievement, or what the actor could do. These considerations restricted the rational, efficient, and economic use of nonhuman facilities and human services.
Barriers to rational action
Nonhuman facilities, such as real estate and instruments of production, are alienable and subject to successive allocations in the Gesellschaft-like organization, such as the farm that is run for profit. The more Gesellschaft-like the organization is, the freer its members are to enter or be placed in new social relations, discontinue old ones, move in space, and be subject to change in status roles, power, and rank. Inalienable instruments of production, unchanging social relations, and inviolable allocations of status roles, power, and rank constitute inhibitions to the rational use both of human and nonhuman resources. Agricultural organizations of the past and so-called underdeveloped agricultural societies of the present tend to harbor such inhibitions.It has frequently been hypothesized by sociologists that the higher the value of an object (especially if its use is fused with sentiment), the greater are the inhibitions to its rational use. In the case of ends, value may be measured in terms of willingness of actors to make sacrifices to obtain or to retain an object. In the case of a norm, value may be measured by the intensity of indignation when the norm is violated and by the degree of harshness of the negative sanction imposed upon the violator. Societies in which malnutrition is commonplace and famines are frequent would, according to the hypothesis, tend to value land very highly and to accord it a quality of sacredness; other facilities requisite to a basic food supply would become fused with affectivity and hedged about with restrictions. The hypothesis would explain the widespread restrictions on free sale, purchase, or ex-change of land, which in turn is often the most important basis for allocation of status roles, rank, and power, since these latter are often ascribed by the relationship of a given actor to the land; the manor’s lord, cotters, and villeins are well-known examples (Loomis & Beegle 1950). It has been observed that food crops in the field and immediately after harvest are often considered sacred; their movement and use during this period must be accompanied by proper ritual. Once the crops are sold, they lose their sacred nature. Similarly, the hypothesis may be applied to explain various types of restrictions on the mobility and alienability of human services in feudal and other traditional organizations.
The limits of rationality in agriculture. Contrary to the cyclical theories of development, agricultural organization has, at least since the industrial revolution, become increasingly efficient and economical in respect to human effort and facilities. Exceptions may be cited in various cases of extreme anomie, as disorder becomes so common and painful that reaction in the form of ultraconservative movements occurs, such as in the German Nazi and Italian fascist movements. The over-all trend, however, has been a shift from Gemeinschaft-like restrictions on utilization of non-human facilities and human services in goal attaining activities toward Gesellschaft-like relations in which these restrictions are at least partially eliminated.
Is it likely that the degree of rationality that attends industrial and market organization in its most Gesellschaft-like form can be made to attend agricultural organization? To explore this possibility, let a given agricultural facility, for instance a unit of land, be likened to a unit of money, say a hundred dollar bill. When the possession, exchange, and transfer of a unit of land can be effected with the same sentimental detachment that would mark the possession, exchange, and transfer of a hundred dollar bill, then a parallel degree of rationality will be evinced by the two types of organization. Most students of rural life and agricultural organization cannot foresee as a likely occurrence early rationalization of agriculture, when land, livestock, machinery, and plant would be as removed from the sacred and as imbued with the secular as are parallel operations in nonagricultural production.
Feudal tenures and relationships
Under medieval European tenure, the feudal manor operated with some slaves who could be sold, but most agricultural workers were, in effect, bound to the soil as serfs and were transferred with the estate, although there were degrees of serfdom and some serfs eventually became free peasants. In rank the bondsmen were below the lesser gentry, the nobility, and the royalty. The basic unit was the tribal group or peasant family, which was characteristic of the less fully developed form of German feudalism that spread to the Low Countries and to the north of Italy, as well as of the fully developed French feudalism that came to prevail in England, northern Spain, the two Sicilies, and the Levant (Boissonnade 1921, p. 120 in 1929 edition). How each man was related to the land determined whether he could marry and under what conditions, what services and payments he would have to render, and under what conditions he could leave the estate. His tenure status prescribed his status role, his rank, and his power. The concept Gemeinschaft from Tünnies and the similar concept “status” from Maine (1861) arose out of the great differences that they noted between the feudal tenures of the Middle Ages and (a) the Gesellschaft-like and contractual relations of the present day and (b) the latifundia (arising out of the enclosure movement in England from 1450 to 1600) and other developments elsewhere, as the customary rights of the various tenure groups of lower rank were disregarded and latifundia came into being.Out of the feudal system grew a stratification pattern based upon the estates, or stände as they are called in Germany. These specified the status roles, rank, power, and life-style of members and institutionalized the means of entry or expulsion by ritual forms. Most of the bases for allocation of placement as exercised under this form of stratification are ascriptive; they have long been associated with rural societies and are still found today in many parts of the world. Since modern business, commerce, and industry require a specified performance, they tend to dissolve the estate form of stratification and replace the ascriptive allocation of its members with allocation by achievement. In the ideal typological form of complete Gesellschaft, there emerges an open-class system in which all persons find their places according to their skills, technical competency, and contributions, with no importance attached to the class position of one’s antecedents or to one’s age or sex. Opposite to this is the caste system of stratification that is found most commonly in agricultural and rural societies, the most extreme example of which exists in India.
Importance of the feudal system. There has been considerable transmission of feudal ideology and of feudal norms, especially those related to rank and power, to the present industrial organization in areas of feudal background, such as England and Germany. Other legacies, however, from the feudal era are probably of greater importance. One such is the influence it had upon the thinking of Marx and Engels, who furnished the basic ideology for communism in Russia and China. The once feudal nations are often contrasted with those having no feudal history in respect to class structure and attitudes toward authority. Marxian doctrine places capitalism in an important intermediary stage between feudalism (or something comparable) and communism. Marx had an unusual interest in the United States, perhaps because of its lack of feudal background. Lenin on the other hand studied the exploitation of Negroes in the rural South and leaped to the conclusion that the United States would follow the European pattern. Marxist and Leninist doctrine aside, recent history shows that industrializing societies without feudal backgrounds more easily adopt equalitarian achievement motivation than do others.
Successors to the feudal pattern
Most of the agriculture of the noncommunist world may be classified according to whether the central producing and consuming unit is the farm family, the large estate, such as the hacienda or the latifundium, or a mixture of these two types of units. The haciendas, latifundia, and similar forms frequently arose out of feudalism. In England, the enclosure movements and other pressures resulted in virtual dispossession of those villagers and farmers that possessed communal property. Much the same development occurred along the Baltic coast in Mecklenburg and Holstein, and in Swedish Pomerania, where the peasants, who were long accustomed to communal tenure of grazing and grass lands, had no protection against property appropriation. The rapidity of change from Gemeinschaft-like relations, with protection based upon custom, to Gesellschaft-like norms of contact left rural dwellers in many areas in a state of semishock, without the necessary knowledge and linkages for secure existence in the new order. The right to ownership and transfer of property in fee simple was not achieved for the peasants in the French Revolution. Owing in part to this failure almost half of the land of France, Italy, and Spain came to be worked by tenants and sharecroppers (Dietze 1933, p. 49). Outright ownership by peasants occurred in much larger proportions in Germany and in the Scandinavian kingdoms.The farm family. Even during the feudal period, when most rural dwellers were subjected to the feudal system, there were yeomen who, as small independent landholders, continued a free existence in limited areas of Europe, such as Upper Bavaria, Swabia, Thuringia, Saxony, Frisia, and Holstein. An ideology of the yeoman—a farm owner and operator without indebtedness—can be traced to areas where substantial numbers of farm families remained free from bondage to the land. A number of leaders, such as Thomas Jefferson, believed that democracy could best survive when many such farmers, who were ready to fight any attempts to subordinate them, peopled the countryside. For Jefferson, who believed that an occasional revolution was good for the political health of nations, it would be these “free yeomen” who would begin such revolutions.
The so-called family farm is a productive unit in which the family is the central entrepreneurial work unit. The designation covers enterprises of widely different character. A family farm in New Jersey may consist of three acres and one thousand laying hens; in Oregon it may comprise 3,200 acres of wheat and grazing land. In the Western Hemisphere the family farm is a vital force in the agriculture of widely dispersed societies, such as Costa Rica, Chile, southern Brazil, Colombia, the United States, and Canada. Turkey, India, Pakistan, Japan, and Korea are examples of areas in the Eastern Hemisphere where the family farm organization is extensive and important. In some respects it constitutes an American ideal. It became the model used by the Allies in reorganizing conquered areas under their control at the end of World War II. Like other American businesses, farms and ranches tend to become larger and larger for many purposes of production. Nevertheless, the “sacredness” of the family farm is frequently demonstrated in American political action at home, as well as in policy for improving agricultural practices abroad.
In most of the industrialized countries where the family farm has predominated, family control is decreasing as the farming operations become larger. An example may be taken from the Heide areas of Germany, which have long been famous for a free peasantry. There the once independent peasants are increasingly beholden to authorities and creditors, many of whom are from the cities, as competitive agriculture fosters the use of costly overhead irrigation systems, which at once irrigate and fertilize the soil and crops. Other developments that may decrease control by the farm family are the following: increased specialization, greater capitalization, greater dependence on both domestic and foreign markets, and increasing employment of farm family members in industry, resulting in part-time farming and dependence upon the urban wage economy. In addition, vertical integration increasingly links the farm family to various other systems, thereby depriving it of autonomy. An example is provided in the widespread practice of contract farming in the poultry industry, organized by hatcherymen or feed dealers who agree to supply chicks, feed, medicine, capital, electricity, heat, and supervision. Although the prices for poultry are guaranteed to the farmer, the system tends to deprive previously independent farm families of the “yeoman freedom,” making them semisharecroppers under control of urban contractors and capital suppliers.
Changes in agricultural organization
Rapid change in agricultural practices and organization usually comes from societal units outside the immediate agricultural system. Perhaps the chief exception to this generalization in the literature on agriculture is the manner in which there developed a relatively highly advanced form of agriculture among the various Protestant sects, such as the Mennonites and the Amish, especially in the German Palatinate. They were known as “clover” farmers and, because of their great ability as agriculturists, were sought by princes of the time to operate farms of the nobility. Farmers from this same strain also became outstanding agriculturists in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the New World without outside assistance. I conjecture that this exceptional development may have issued from the knowledge of scholarly Roman Catholic priests who had access in the universities and the monasteries of the time to advanced knowledge about agriculture and who defected in sizable numbers during this epoch, often to found or to join such nonconformist religious groups as those later known as the Mennonites and the Amish. If this interpretation is correct, it is a most interesting form of systemic linkage, by which the defecting priests brought knowledge beyond that of the traditional base to the peasant groups of which they became a part.Systemic linkage
The traditional base of knowledge gathered from generations of actual farming experience is generally insufficient to spark rapid change. Gemeinschaft-like societies, which typically live by tradition, distrust innovations. Only as agricultural organizations are linked to various knowledge producing and distributing centers does rapid change in agriculture take place. Typical linkages promoting changes are those with credit facilities, organized experimental animal and plant stock breeding, and market economies. Wherever very rapid change in agriculture has taken place, these facilities have been available. No country with advanced agriculture is today without agricultural experiment stations or other forms of scientific activity, operating to improve planting and animal stocks as well as agricultural practices, organization, and technology generally.Systemic linkage between these agencies and the agricultural production units may take many forms and should receive more careful study than it has been given. The folk schools, universities, and agricultural services have been important in Denmark. Extension services in the United States, rural academies in Pakistan, national ministries of agriculture in Latin America, and agencies of community development and cooperation in India are other examples of the institutionalized linkages between agricultural research and practice. Everywhere that rapid progress has been made, agricultural credit has been made available on a rational basis at interest rates comparable to or lower than those prevailing in other productive enterprises. The credit system of usury, common in the underdeveloped areas of the Far East (which often require that the borrower pay 100 to 300 per cent per annum to a local moneylender bearing a semi-Gemeinschaft-like, personal, or patron relation to the debtor), usually must be abolished or radically modified before rapid progress in agricultural production can take place.
Of utmost importance is the form of the linkage between the agricultural production organizations —whatever type of farm that might be—and the centers of knowledge about such facilities as credit, markets, and the results of basic and applied research. Especially in underdeveloped areas, the chief lack is not in knowledge itself but rather in the transmission of that knowledge. Such scientific establishments as experiment stations, research laboratories in government bureaus, and universities do the “cognitive mapping” necessary to improve the practices, stocks, and technology (Loomis 1960, pp. 12–13, 68–69). The incumbents of certain status roles, such as teachers and extension workers, link the systems in which the concern is cognitive mapping with the systems in which the concern is efficient production. To be effective in their status roles, such professionals not only must have mastered their own specialties in the agricultural sciences but must also be adept at appraising those systems most amenable to linkage. The rate of adoption of new agricultural practices will vary as these factors vary in effectiveness.
Diffusion of innovations
An important aspect of social change in agricultural organization is the relative willingness to adopt improved stocks, facilities, and practices. A series of types or semistatus roles has identified agriculturists relative to their time and manner of adopting new practices once these are made available. In the industrialized West only 3 per cent are “innovators” who are frequently linked directly to agricultural scientists whom they know personally. They evaluate science highly, do much of their own cognitive mapping in accordance with the canons of science, consider profits in agriculture as a most important goal, and take risks to attain this goal by borrowing money. Innovators make decisions and act upon them more quickly than others. In terms of systemic linkage, innovators are not linked to their neighborhoods as closely as others, are more cosmopolitan in orientation, and, although relatively well off financially, usually do not rank as high in local neighborhood affairs as do the next group to adopt practices, namely the “early adopters.” These latter may constitute something like 14 per cent of the agricultural producers. Early adopters and the next group—“early majority adopters”—may constitute together more than 35 per cent of the agricultural producers. They are linked both to the local neighborhood and community groups and to the knowledge centers, such as universities and experiment stations. The last groups to adopt improved stocks and practices have been called the “laggards” and “late adopters”; they evaluate science less highly than do earlier adopters (see Rogers 1962).The case of an effective and generally adopted weed killer may serve as an example of differential adoption rates; it was adopted almost as soon as it was available by the innovators, whereas it was adopted after a ten-year delay by the laggards (North Central … 1961, p. 6). Laggards confine their interaction almost completely to their neighborhoods and localities, have a minimum of systemic linkage with knowledge centers, have relatively low rank, and are usually older and less well educated than innovators and early adopters. Laggards and late adopters engage frequently in a type of cognitive mapping akin to magic, such as the effect of the moon on seed germination. They tend to seek evaluations and reinforce their own judgments by asking the opinion of friends and neighbors. The end for which farming is conducted for the laggards is often “farming as a way of life,” in contrast to the profit motive, which is a highly valued end for the innovator. Usually the norms for agriculture and for life are highly traditional. Various studies in underdeveloped agricultural societies indicate that, in the above respects, the majority of peasants and laborers resemble the laggards and late adopters. One of the prime problems in the effort to increase the productivity of areas of traditional agriculture is to increase the proportion of innovators and early adopters [see Diffusion, article onthe diffusion of innovations].
Agriculture and society
As agricultural production becomes more efficient and markets and credit facilities more accessible, cities become larger, with the urban increase accruing largely from rural populations, which almost always have higher replacement rates. It has been suggested that high mobility is the chief differentiating feature of urbanized and developing societies. However, the movement of people is not always from the farms to the cities. During the depression of the 1930s a great “back to the land movement” began throughout the urbanized world, and in both Europe and America various forms of settlement designed to combine a home garden or subsistence with city wage work were established. This phenomenon throws in relief some of the fundamental patterns involved in the development of modern differentiated and industrialized societies.Throughout history man has dreamed of establishing communities that are organized and designed to eliminate human conflict, poverty, and ignorance. Although such blights are often found in agricultural societies, the differentiated, industrialized urban societies generally manifest higher suicide rates, more anomie, and more alienation of man from man than do rural societies. Although it is the belief of many, including the author, that man’s flexible and rational nature, coupled with his ability to transmit knowledge, makes it possible for him to develop organizational techniques suited to conditions in which the division of labor and institutional differentiation dominate, many thinkers disagree. They believe an urban existence is un-natural and dysfunctional for mental and physical well-being. Such thinking is sometimes based upon the following facts and logic. Rural societies, particularly those not linked to modern industrialized cities, are less differentiated and more integrated, in the sense that their members fill fewer conflicting status roles (for example, the policeman who is a neighbor of a habitual delinquent) and manifest greater consensus on the goals and norms that guide life. Moreover, fewer members find existing institutions so meaningless that identity is sought with deviant groups, especially those that take pride in and flaunt their deviancy, as is fairly common in Western industrial society.
To understand the variation among agricultural organizations and rural societies, it may be helpful to visualize the “perfectly integrated society”: the quintessence of societal integration that has no empirical existence but may be projected as an ideal type (see Williams [1951] 1960, pp. 374, 378). It would be small in size, stable in demographic composition and in physical milieu, with relatively few linkages with other societies. It would have few “center activities,” whereby man refines and converts for his final use the products of “field activities,” such as agriculture, mining, lumbering, and herding. In a perfectly integrated society, there is complete consensus on goals and unwavering dedication to the norms of goal fulfillment. People find it a pleasure to do their duty, and spontaneous approval is given to all who do so. In such a society, there would, of course, be no need for social control and no police force or other sanctioning agency.
The impact of urbanization
Factors of differentiation, however, have emerged very early, as recorded history demonstrates. Simple agricultural societies, which are subject to the vicissitudes of flood, drought, and other natural calamities, employ religious rituals, especially at planting and harvest time. The keepers of such rituals—the holy men and the medicine men—not only supply through their activities much needed integration but also frequently specify planting stocks and times and probably become the first agricultural as well as religious experts. Thus, integration becomes increasingly difficult to achieve as status roles become differentiated not only in agriculture and religion but also in many other spheres, such as health, education, and government. “Center activities” become more numerous and important. As societies have become industrialized and urbanized, many variations have been observed, but some similarities and patterns may be mentioned.First, power or control, even during periods when an agriculturally based nobility rules, comes to be highly concentrated in the urban centers. Moreover, societal integration and boundary maintenance are limited when these centers are few and weak. This is the chief reason why in modern times the spread of communism, contrary to Marx’s prediction that it would be introduced by the city proletarian masses, has been most prominent in peasant societies with weak central activities and government. The rank of various incumbents of status roles in the systems located in the field decreases as urbanization places greater emphasis upon center activities. These differences in rank are determined not so much by the difficulty of learning the skills demanded by the new status roles (it is probably more difficult to learn to train and use oxen and horses as draft animals than it is to operate an elevator in a hotel, for instance) as they are by the fact that the higher replacement rates of families that teach these skills to their children, as well as the lower demand for rural skills, generally disparages field activities. Because of available financial support, most able professionals tend to gravitate to the larger centers, whereas fewer elect to practice in rural areas; thus, there are fewer highly trained specialists (per ten thousand people), such as doctors and dentists, in rural than in urban areas.
Those engaged in center activities over several generations less frequently participate in conservative and reactionary movements and more frequently participate in liberal and radical movements than those engaged in field activities. It is often found that in urban areas the ultraconservatives and reactionaries frequently have recently come from the areas where field activities predominate. This in part explains the emphasis in such ultraconservative or reactionary movements as those of the German Nazis on returning agriculture to its earlier forms.
Those engaged in field activities have higher demographic replacement rates than those engaged in center activities. As centers emerge, the migration results in larger proportions of females and persons of employable age in the areas where center activities predominate. On the other hand, areas in which field activities predominate have larger proportions of males and persons in the younger and older less productive ages. Finally, urbanization—especially rapid urbanization—produces strains that are reflected in increasing rates of suicide and certain forms of criminality, such as homicide. However, when urbanization is in advanced stages and urban traits are being rapidly diffused to the countryside suicide rates of rural areas may sometimes, if only rarely, exceed urban rates.
Charles P. Loomis
[Directly related are the entriesCommunity–society continua; rural society. Other relevant material may be found inFood, article onworld problems; Peasantry; Technical assistance; and in the biographies ofMaine; TÖnnies.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boissonade, Prosper (1921) 1964 Life and Work in Medieval Europe: The Evolution of Medieval EconomyFrom the Fifth to the Fifteenth Century. New York: Harper. → First published as Le travail dans I’Europe chrétienne au moyen âge.Dietze, C. von 1933 Peasantry. Volume 12, pages 48–53 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
Fustel de coulanges, numa denis (1864) 1956 The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. → First published in French.
Loomis, Charles P. 1960 Social Systems: Essays on Their Persistence and Change. Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand.
Loomis, Charles P.; and BEEGLE, J. ALLAN (1950) 1955 Rural Social Systems: A Textbook in Rural Sociology and Anthropology. London: Bailey & Swinfen. → See sections on land tenure for a comprehensive bibliography.
Maine, Henry J. S. (1861) 1960 Ancient Law: Its Connection With the Early History of Society, and Its Relations to Modern Ideas. Rev. ed. New York: Dutton; London and Toronto: Dent. → A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Beacon.
North Central Rural Sociology Subcommittee for the Study of Diffusion of Farm Practices 1961 Adopters of New Farm Ideas: Characteristics and Communication Behavior. Unpublished manuscript, Michigan Agricultural Extension Service, East Lansing.
Rogers, Everett M. 1962 Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press.
TÖnnies, Ferdinand (1887) 1957 Community and Society (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft). Translated and edited by Charles P. Loomis. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press. → First published in German. A paperback edition was published in 1963 by Harper.
Vinogradoff, Paul (1905) 1920 The Growth of the Manor. 3d ed. New York: Macmillan.
Williams, Robin M. JR. (1951) 1960 American Society: A Sociological Interpretation. 2d ed., rev. New York: Knopf.
III HISTORY
We now know that the historian’s desire to set in order and tighten the history of agriculture must not go so far as to dissolve the diversity of events into a single trend of evolution or even into a “law,” as did the writers of antiquity with their rigorous sequence of nomadism developing from hunting and fishing and agriculture from nomadism or as did the historians of the nineteenth century, who held that communal ownership was a necessary phase in the evolution of society (de Laveleye 1874; von Below 1920).Much archeological evidence, including that from recently developed techniques of aerial photography and research on organic remains, indicates that hunting, fishing, and food gathering persisted side by side with simple cultivation during long periods of prehistory. Similar evidence, particularly from implements and aerial photography, discloses early field arrangements throughout Europe that give no appearance of having been farmed in common. [For fuller treatment of the origins and early history of agriculture, see Domestication; Urban Revolution.]
With the development of advanced civilizations in the Near East there came new plants, new implements, new techniques (irrigation, fertilizer, regular succession of crops), and new forms of organization of agriculture (latifundia, slave plantations). These innovations reached the countries north of the Alps via Greece and Rome, although many of them vanished again with the Romans.
Europe’s population, however, had reached a low point at about the middle of the first millennium A.D. It is estimated that no more than four million people (about four per square kilometer) then lived in the area today occupied by England, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany. This in turn meant wide-open stretches for man and animal, little agriculture, emphasis on animal husbandry, and widely scattered settlements.
The medieval expansion
The middle of the first millennium may be regarded as the turning point at which a new expansion set in, an expansion that has continued with reverses and interruptions to the present day. Starting in the sixth and seventh centuries and expanding after the year 1000, forests were cleared, marshes drained, and land along the coasts reclaimed from the sea. The higher elevations were opened up in the lower mountain ranges; the upper limit of permanent settlement in the Alps was higher about the year 1300 than ever before or since. By the time this wave of land expansion subsided (at the beginning of the fourteenth century) the arable land of the old Europe had been increased many times over.Most of the villages still in existence in central Europe existed at the end of the medieval expansion of cultivated land. Only few inhabited places have been added since, while many have disappeared since the high Middle Ages. For example, it is estimated that about the year 1300 there were some 170,000 independent—that is, territorially separate—settlements in Germany (within the confines of the Germany of 1933). Since there were no more than about 140,000 localities there in 1933, and since several thousand of these were founded in modern times, we may assume that every fifth inhabited place disappeared during the late Middle Ages—i.e., in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—and was never re-established.
As large numbers of such deserted villages likewise appeared in the Scandinavian countries and in England, France, and Poland in the late Middle Ages (although in those countries they were reestablished more often than was the case in Germany), we must look for explanations that enable us to comprehend the accumulation of deserted
villages in the late Middle Ages as a universal European phenomenon. The falling population in Europe of the late Middle Ages affords one explanation. The population of central Europe dropped perhaps as early as the great famine of 1307–1317, but certainly during the bubonic plague (the Black Death) of 1348–1350, which came out of the Orient and swept over Europe; and it remained low, for the first wave of the plague was followed by others. The depopulation was followed by migrations. The peasants abandoned the settlements in inaccessible and elevated localities (Norway, the Alps), on infertile soil, or in perilous social circumstances. They migrated into the valleys—to a more productive agriculture or a smaller burden—or else into the towns. The naturalization lists of many towns in the late Middle Ages, and sometimes the very names of those naturalized (which reveal their origins), are evidence of this flight from the land in the late Middle Ages.
Economic conditions must also be acknowledged as a causative factor in the movement from the countryside to the city. During the late Middle Ages the prices of agricultural products fell; the prices of craft products and wages were much steadier (Figure 1). Unskilled laborers often received the counterpart of 20 to 30 kilograms of grain as their day’s wages. This, too, was a consequence of the decreased population, and although the peasants did not comprehend these relationships, they saw that work was easier, life was safer, and burdens were lighter in the towns than on the land. Therefore they migrated to the city, and when they were no longer able to do so, they sent their sons to the townsfolk—as reported in a Prussian source, “to serve or to learn a trade.”
Field arrangements
When the period of deserting the villages came to an end, clearing and settling were resumed, and the manorial system that had come down from the Middle Ages was extended still further. Over large areas of central Europe this was the three-field or multifield economy, with common pasturage and the open-field system.For a long time it was thought that these field arrangements were linked to the taking over of land during the barbarian invasions. It was believed that the initial settlers had occupied the land in common and divided it into farmstead land, arable land, and meadows, with the arable land divided into larger plots and these plots subdivided into strips, each family then being allocated several strips. This implied that the strip farming of the fields and the broad parceling out of the strips with regular crop rotation had existed “from the very outset,” a notion that had to be abandoned. The village with “open fields” (Gewanndorf) had precursors from which its subsequent form, which has come down to us, evolved through expansion, alteration, and reconstruction.
Expansion signifies the gradual growth of arable land by the extension of clearing. In many cases the later fields can be distinguished from the earlier ones by their names, their location with respect to the village, and their shape; and even today we can perceive the original fields, to which usually only a few farmsteads were attached. As the number of peasant families increased the area of arable land had to be expended. If enough waste land and woodland were available, the arable land could be extended by clearing from the village as a center. Since this work of clearing, especially in the bush and forest, could rarely be handled by a single peasant family, it is easy to understand the parceling out of the newly cleared land. It reflected the individual’s share in the work done in common. The expansion theory explains the gradual growth of arable land, although it does not explain the combining of parcels and strips into large fields, which were cultivated according to strict rules in the old villages.
The alteration theory proposes to explain the origin of this utilization of the arable land in common. It depicts conditions that might well have necessitated a transition from a more individual to a more cooperative economy, perhaps in the following manner. As the populations increased, real properties began to be subdivided; fields were cut up into irregular shapes and locations. This gave rise to the “medley” of pieces of land, which compelled cooperation. Crossings had to be regulated, water rights settled, and cultivation plans attuned to one another. The sown fields also had to be fenced in to protect them from grazing cattle, shepherds had to be appointed, and other arrangements made that could be effected only in agreement with neighbors. This promoted a constant association of the joint proprietors of a field, as well as the arising of a collective consciousness that facilitated renunciation of individual rights, no longer so useful.
We cannot say with certainty when this took place. The origins of these utilizations in common of arable land probably go far back in time. Tacitus describes conditions that might be interpreted as such commons, but these are probably attributable to special circumstances, such as migrations or states of war. It is unlikely that most of the common utilizations of land originated much earlier than the expansion period of the high Middle Ages, and many new villages in the formerly Slavic East were founded in the same period (eleventh to thirteenth centuries). The system of strip farming, which had proved its worth, was transferred to these commons. Field areas were demarcated according to soil quality and distance from the village. On the resulting scattered holdings all the peasants were treated as equitably as possible and moreover were equally affected by wet weather, rain, or hail, a situation that diminished individual risk.
Recent research has shown, however, that a large-field economy had by no means gained as much ground in the high Middle Ages as had previously been assumed, even where it subsequently became the rule. Here we are aided by the reconstruction theory. This theory makes allowance for the period of deserted villages. Once the villages had decayed, the fields had gone to weeds, and property rights had been obscured, planning, distribution, and rearrangement could be effected as in virgin territory. Parcels could be laid out and strips staked out and assembled into large fields without disturbing older rights. Here and there the old field boundaries remained, but as a rule they disappeared on cultivated land. Then, and in many instances only at the beginning of modern times, did the dominant picture become that of the large-field economy of a group of peasants joined in a working association.
Yet a countermovement developed at an early date, leading from the (relative) collective to greater individuation of property and usufruct rights. In England, enclosures, the fencing of sections of fields and forests for individual use, began as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century the peasants of the bishopric of Kempten in Allgäu began to dissolve their villages and common lands and to shift their farmsteads to the former common lands. The north European nobility began to withdraw their fields from the village common lands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this trend became stronger in the nineteenth century. Yet the elimination of farming strips, which began thus—with or without the initial disintegration of the villages —remains even today one of the major tasks of agrarian policy in many European countries.
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