Chapter 53 Agricultural Outlook

Chapter 53 Agricultural Outlook
After confirming his cooperation with Hansel, Paul Greiman began to think about agriculture in the territory.

First of all, on the land ownership, nominally, all the land in Alda Territory belonged to the Gleiman family, just like all the land under the sky belonged to the emperor in ancient times of the Celestial Dynasty, but the actual arable land that was used for agricultural production was attributed as follows:

Nearly one-third of the arable land belongs directly to the lord’s house, and the output of the land all belongs to the Gladman family, one-third of the strong land is occupied by large landlords and squires in various villages and towns (including the vassals of the Gladman family), who pay taxes to the lord’s house every year, and the rest of the output belongs to themselves, and one-third of the weak land belongs to quite a lot of homesteaders or small landowners.

According to the general pattern, the Earl should have a violent or mild land redistribution reform, so that all the peasants in the territory have a piece of land that can feed themselves and their families, so as to achieve the ploughman’s land, and then everyone praises the lord’s heroic name.

But Paul is not looking forward to the small peasant economy under the happy pastoral life, he envisioned the industrialization of machine production, and the small peasant economy is one of the major obstacles to the road to industrialization.

First of all, the small farm economy to a large number of farmers bound to a small piece of land, limiting the formation of free labor, the lack of labor will limit the speed of industrial development.

Secondly, the self-sufficiency and instability of the small peasant economy makes the vast number of small peasants live in poverty and do not have the power to buy more consumer goods, which results in a narrow market and hinders the development of the commodity economy.

Thirdly, the weak economic power of small farmers makes it difficult for them to buy expensive machines and they cannot afford to adopt other new technologies or carry out large-scale soil improvement and water conservation, etc., which is not conducive to increasing the yield of arable land.

Finally, the prolonged existence of small plots of land also hinders the strengthening of the division of labour in agriculture, restricts the expansion of cash crops and slows down the progress of the commercialization of agricultural products.

All these factors will prevent the development of industrialization. Not to mention the negative role of the smallholder economy in the modern history of the Celestial Kingdom, a comparison of the impact of the modern land systems of France and Britain on the industrialization of the two countries can illustrate a lot of issues.

After the outbreak of the bourgeois revolution in France, the old feudal land relations were destroyed, and the land of the nobles and the church was distributed to the peasants to make them small landowners, which was of great progressive significance at that time, and it also increased the motivation of the peasants and promoted the development of the economy.

However, due to various reasons, this small peasant economy based on private ownership of small plots of land lasted for more than 100 years in France. The small peasant economy gradually became a constraint on industrial development, delaying the historical process of France’s transformation from an agricultural country to an industrial country, which was one of the major reasons for the relatively slow economic development of France in the late 19th century.

The United Kingdom is different, although the enclosure movement, which is compared to “sheep eat people”, made countless peasants lose all their property, displaced, and the period was full of violence, oppression, and caused countless tragedies, but objectively provided favorable conditions for the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom.

The peasants who lost their land entered the cities in order to earn a living, which accelerated the process of urbanization and provided cheap and free labour for the development of industry.

The enclosure movement made it possible to link up a large amount of land that had previously been divided into small parcels, making it easier to plant new crops, add good fertilizers, use better tools, reform the irrigation system, and adopt advanced farming methods – all of which small farmers could not afford on their own, thus greatly increasing the overall yield of agricultural production.

This is one of the major reasons why the Industrial Revolution occurred first in England in the 18th century, when scientific development was equally fruitful in France.

Therefore, Paul did not want to “equalize the land”, but he wanted to centralize the land even more. The land owned by the lordship and the major landowners was already concentrated enough in terms of ownership, but it was still geographically dispersed, so he needed to coordinate the land exchange between all the owners, promote the transfer of land and the concentration of business through a series of policies and regulations, promote the establishment of large-scale farms and the promotion of agricultural mechanization, as well as build large-scale water conservancy projects according to the distribution of arable land.

For those farmers and small landowners, the use of violent means to deprive them of ownership is not within the scope of Paul’s considerations, the last life of the origin and the education he received so that he is not willing to betray their “spiritual class”. Since it already exists, then as a supplement to the large farm economy, under the same conditions of the unit yield is also a little higher, after all, the dynasty’s intensive farming to feed the population of more than a billion people, there are still a lot of advantages.

He intends to use the village as a unit to establish a farming association, cooperatives and the like, with the lord’s house paying for farm tools, plough oxen and other means of production, and renting them to homesteaders at a low price in order to help them improve their labor efficiency.

As for the labor force needed for industrialization, he had his eyes on another large group in the territory – serfs, slavery existed in this world and was very common.

Ironically, the church that Paul both despised and scorned was the biggest opponent of slavery, and one of the important concepts at the beginning of its establishment was the equality of all people under God, and the church’s status was widely recognized by all countries, and also vigorously promoted a number of abolitionist campaigns, but in the end, they all ended up because of the resistance of the vested interest classes, and with the church’s senior management and the aristocrats of all countries becoming more and more in sync, the concept gradually stayed in a slogan. The idea of abolition gradually remained a slogan.

But the count does not intend to just as a slogan, subjectively, he can not accept the existence of slavery, objectively, the development of industry requires a large number of laborers, so the abolition of slavery in their own territories is imperative.

For the serfs directly under the Lord’s House, Paul intends to give them freedom to stay or go, and those who stay will be cultivated into agricultural workers in their own new farms. For the serfs owned by the major landowners, if they don’t let go, then they will wait for the wheels of history to run over them.

As for the agricultural laborers lost due to the abolition of slavery, they can be completely replenished through the promotion of new agricultural tools; machinery or equipment that is useless in narrow lands can be effectively used in the new large farms.

Paul intends to manufacture Rotherham plows, Croskill breakers, serrated harrows, strip planters, harvesters, threshers, and other agricultural machinery, which can be fully manufactured under current technological conditions and can be operated by animal power alone, all of which were the sharpest tools of the year in the 18th-century agricultural revolution in England.

Another way to improve land yield is the four-bed rotation method, this planting system, that is, all the arable land is divided into four cultivation areas, in the four cultivation areas were planted turnips, barley, clover and wheat and other crops, each year, in turn, rotation.

It abolishes land recreation, and the arable land after crop harvesting is not used as grazing land, and changes the grazing land into arable land, expanding the area of crop cultivation; it plants legume pasture and applies livestock stable fertilizer to accelerate the restoration and improvement of soil fertility, which not only is conducive to a steady increase in crop production, but also is conducive to the long-term rational use of arable land, and also can provide high-quality housed fodder for livestock; it prompts the change of livestock feeding from grazing to housed fodder, which is conducive to the improvement of livestock production level. Improvement of the production level of the livestock industry.

There is also the cultivation of good seed, but this Paul is not very understandable, can only wait until the recruitment to the relevant agricultural experts and then implement this matter.

Paul firmly believes that after some of the above reforms, the agricultural output of Alda Territory will definitely have a substantial increase, so that it can release and feed more laborers, paving the way for the future industrialization.

(End of Chapter)