The Conquest of Bread Chapter 17. Agriculture
Author: Peter Kropotkin Publisher: N/A Publish Date:1892 Review Date: Status:⌛️
Annotations
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Political economy has often been reproached with drawing all its deductions from the decidedly false principle, that the only incentive capable of forcing a man to augment his power of production is personal interest in its narrowest sense.
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The reproach is perfectly true; so true that epochs of great industrial discoveries and true progress in industry are precisely those in which the happiness of all was inspiring men, and in which personal enrichment was least thought of. The great investigators in science and the great inventors aimed, above all, at giving greater freedom of mankind. And if Watt, Stephenson, Jacquard,1 etc., could have only foreseen what a state of misery their sleepless nights would bring to the workers, they certainly would have burned their designs and broken their models.
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Another principle that pervades political economy is just as false. It is the tacit admission, common to all economists, that if there is often overproduction in certain branches, a society will nevertheless never have sufficient products to satisfy the wants of all, and that consequently the day will never come when nobody will be forced to sell his labour in exchange for wages. This tacit admission is found at the basis of all theories and all the so-called ‘laws’ taught by economists.
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And yet it is certain that the day when any civilized association of individuals would ask itself, what are the needs of all, and the means of satisfying them, it would see that, in industry as in agriculture, it already possesses sufficient to provide abundantly for all needs, on condition that it knows how to apply these means to satisfy real needs.
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That this is true as regards industry no one can contest. Indeed, it suffices to study the processes already in use to extract coal and ore, to obtain steel and work it, to manufacture on a great scale what is used for clothing, etc., in order to perceive that we could already increase our production fourfold or more, and yet use for that less work than we are using now.
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We go further. We assert that agriculture is in the same position: those who cultivate the soil, like the manufacturers, already could increase their production, not only fourfold but tenfold, and they can put it into practice as soon as they feel the need of it – as soon as a socialist organization of work will be established instead of the present capitalistic one.
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Each time agriculture is spoken of, men imagine a peasant bending over the plough, throwing badly sorted corn haphazard into the ground and waiting anxiously for what the good or bad season will bring forth; they think of a family working from morn to night and reaping as reward a rude bed, dry bread and coarse beverage. In a word, they picture ‘the savages’ of La Bruyère.2
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And for these men, ground down to such a misery, the utmost relief that society proposes is to reduce their taxes or their rent. But even most social reformers do not dare to imagine a cultivator standing erect, taking leisure, and producing by a few hours’ work per day sufficient food to nourish, not only his own family, but a hundred men more at the least. In their most glowing dreams of the future socialists do not go beyond American extensive culture, which, after all, is but the infancy of agricultural art.
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But the thinking agriculturist has broader ideas today – his conceptions are on a far grander scale. He only asks for a fraction of an acre in order to produce sufficient vegetables for a family; and to feed twenty-five horned beasts he needs no more space than he formerly required to feed one; his aim is to make his own soil, to defy seasons and climate, to warm both air and earth around the young plant; to produce, in a word, on one acre what he used to gather from fifty acres, and that without any excessive fatigue – by greatly reducing, on the contrary, the total of former labour. He knows that we will be able to feed everybody by giving to the culture of the fields no more time than what each can give with pleasure and joy. This is the present tendency of agriculture.
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While scientific men, led by Liebig,3 the creator of the chemical theory of agriculture, often got on the wrong tack in their love of mere theories, unlettered agriculturists opened up new roads to prosperity. Market-gardeners of Paris, Troyes, Rouen, Scotch and English gardeners, Flemish and Lombardian farmers, peasants of Jersey, Guernsey, and farmers on the Scilly Isles have opened up such large horizons that the mind hesitates to grasp them. While up till lately a family of peasants needed at least seventeen to twenty acres to live on the produce of the soil – and we know how peasants live – we can now no longer say what is the minimum area on which all that is necessary to a family can be grown, even including articles of luxury, if the soil is worked by means of intensive culture.
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Twenty years ago it could already be asserted that a population of thirty million individuals could live very well, without importing anything, on what could be grown in Great Britain. But now, when we see the progress recently made in France, in Germany, in England, and when we contemplate the new horizons which open before us, we can say that in cultivating the earth as it is already cultivated in many places, even on poor soils, fifty or sixty million inhabitants to the territory of Great Britain would still be a very feeble proportion to what man could exact from the soil.
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In any case (as we are about to demonstrate) we may consider it as absolutely proved that if tomorrow Paris and the two departments of Seine and of Seine-et-Oise organized themselves as an anarchist commune, in which all worked with their hands, and if the entire universe refused to send them a single bushel of wheat, a single head of cattle, a single basket of fruit, and left them only the territory of the two departments, they could not only produce all the corn, meat and vegetables necessary for themselves, but also vegetables and fruit which are now articles of luxury, in sufficient quantities for all.
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And, in addition, we affirm that the sum total of this labour would be far less than that expended at present to feed these people with corn harvested in Auvergne and Russia, with vegetables produced a little everywhere by extensive agriculture, and with fruit grown in the South.
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It is self-evident that we in nowise desire all exchange to be suppressed, nor that each region should strive to produce that which will only grow in its climate by a more or less artificial culture. But we care to draw attention to the fact that the theory of exchange, such as is understood today, is strangely exaggerated – that exchange is often useless and even harmful. We assert, moreover, that people have never had a right conception of the immense labour of southern wine growers, nor that of Russian and Hungarian corn growers, whose excessive labour could also be very much reduced if they adopted intensive culture, instead of their present system of extensive agriculture.
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It would be impossible to quote here the mass of facts on which we base our assertions. We are therefore obliged to refer our readers who want further information to another book, Fields, Factories, and Workshops.* Above all we earnestly invite those who are interested in the question to read several excellent works published in France and elsewhere, and of which we give a list at the close of this book.a As to the inhabitants of large towns, who have as yet no real notion of what agriculture can be, we advise them to explore the surrounding market-gardens. They need but observe and question the market-gardeners, and a new world will be open to them. They will then be able to see what European agriculture may be in the twentieth century; and they will understand with what force the social revolution will be armed when we know the secret of taking everything we need from the soil. A few facts will suffice to show that our assertions are in no way exaggerated. We only wish them to be preceded by a few general remarks.
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We know in what a wretched condition European agriculture is. If the cultivator of the soil is not plundered by the landowner, he is robbed by the state. If the state taxes him moderately, the money-lender enslaves him by means of promissory notes, and soon turns him into the simple tenant of a soil belonging in reality to a financial company. The landlord, the state and the banker thus plunder the cultivator by means of rent, taxes and interest. The sum varies in each country, but it never falls below the quarter, very often the half of the raw produce. In France and in Italy agriculturists paid the state quite recently as much as 44 per cent of the gross produce.
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Moreover, the share of the owner and the state always goes on increasing. As soon as the cultivator has obtained more plentiful crops by prodigies of labour, invention or initiative, the tribute he will owe to the landowner, the state and the banker will augment in proportion. If he doubles the number of bushels reaped per acre, rent will be doubled, and taxes too, and the state will take care to raise them still more if the prices go up. And so on. In short, everywhere the cultivator of the soil works twelve to sixteen hours a day; these three vultures take from him everything he might lay by; they rob him everywhere of what would enable him to improve his culture. This is why agriculture progresses so slowly.
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The cultivator can only occasionally make some progress, in some exceptional regions, under quite exceptional circumstances, following upon a quarrel between the three vampires. And yet we have said nothing about the tribute every cultivator pays to the manufacturer. Every machine, every spade, every barrel of chemical manure, is sold to him at three or four times its real cost. Nor let us forget the middleman, who levies the lion’s share of the earth’s produce. This is why, during all this century of invention and progress, agriculture has only improved from time to time on very limited areas.
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Happily there have always been small oases, neglected for some time by the vultures; and here we learn what intensive agriculture can produce for mankind. Let us mention a few examples. In the American prairies (which, however, only yield meagre spring wheat crops, from seven to fifteen bushels an acre, and even these are often marred by periodical droughts), 500 men, working only during eight months, produce the annual food of 50,000 people. With all the improvements of the last three years, one man’s yearly labour (300 days) yields, delivered in Chicago as flour, the yearly food of 250 men. Here the result is obtained by a great economy in manual labour: on those vast plains, ploughing, harvesting, threshing, are organized in almost military fashion. There is no useless running to and fro, no loss of time – all is done with parade-like precision.
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This is agriculture on a large scale – extensive agriculture, which takes the soil from nature without seeking to improve it. When the earth has yielded all it can, they leave it; they seek elsewhere for a virgin soil, to be exhausted in its turn. But there is also ‘intensive’ agriculture, which is already worked, and will be more and more so, by machinery. Its object is to cultivate a limited space well, to manure, to improve, to concentrate work, and to obtain the largest crop possible. This kind of culture spreads every year, and whereas agriculturists in the south of France and on the fertile plains of western America are content with an average crop of eleven to fifteen bushels per acre by extensive culture, they reap regularly thirty-nine, even fifty-five, and sometimes sixty bushels per acre in the north of France. The annual consumption of a man is thus obtained from less than a quarter of an acre.
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And the more intense the culture is, the less work is expended to obtain a bushel of wheat. Machinery replaces man at the preliminary work and for the improvements needed by the land – such as draining, clearing of stones – which will double the crops in future, once and for ever. Sometimes nothing but keeping the soil free of weeds, without manuring, allows an average soil to yield excellent crops from year to year. It has been done for forty years in succession at Rothamstead, in Hertfordshire.
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However, let us not write an agricultural romance, but be satisfied with a crop of forty-four bushels per acre. That needs no exceptional soil, but merely a rational culture; and let us see what it means.
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The 3,600,000 individuals who inhabit the two departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise consume yearly for their food a little less than twenty-two million bushels of cereals, chiefly wheat; and in our hypothesis they would have to cultivate, in order to obtain this crop, 494,200 acres out of the 1,507,300 acres which they possess. It is evident they would not cultivate them with spades. That would need too much time – ninety-six work-days of five hours per acre. It would be preferable to improve the soil once for all – to drain what needed draining, to level what needed levelling, to clear the soil of stones, were it even necessary to spend five million days of five hours in this preparatory work – an average of ten work-days to each acre.
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Then they would plough with the steamdigger, which would take one and three-fifths of a day per acre, and they would give another one and three-fifths of a day for working with the double plough. Seeds would be sorted by steam instead of taken haphazard, and they would be carefully sown in rows instead of being thrown to the four winds. Now all this work would not take ten days of five hours per acre if the work were done under good conditions. But if ten million work-days are given to good culture during three or four years, the result will be that later on crops of forty-four to fifty-five bushels per acre will be obtained by only working half the time.
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Fifteen million work-days will thus have been spent to give bread to a population of 3,600,000 inhabitants. And the work would be such that everyone could do it without having muscles of steel, or without having even worked the ground before. The initiative and the general distribution of work would come from those who know the soil. As to the work itself, there is no townsman of either sex so enfeebled as to be incapable of looking after machines and of contributing his share to agrarian work after a few hours’ apprenticeship.
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Well, when we consider that in the present chaos, in a city like Paris, without counting the unemployed of the upper classes, there are always about 100,000 workmen out of work in their several trades, we see that the power lost in our present organization would alone suffice to give, with a rational culture, all the bread that is necessary for the three or four million inhabitants of the two departments.
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We repeat, this is no fancy dream, and we have not yet spoken of the truly intensive agriculture. We have not depended upon the wheat (obtained in three years by Mr Hallett4) of which one grain, replanted, produced 5,000 or 6,000, and occasionally 10,000 grains, which would give the wheat necessary for a family of five individuals on an area of 120 square yards. On the contrary, we have only mentioned what is being already achieved by numerous farmers in France, England, Belgium, etc., and what might be done tomorrow with the experience and knowledge acquired already by practice on a large scale.
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But without a revolution, neither tomorrow, nor after tomorrow will see it done, because it is not to the interest of landowners and capitalists; and because peasants who would find their profit in it have neither the knowledge nor the money, nor the time to obtain what is necessary to go ahead.
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The society of today has not yet reached this stage. But let Parisians proclaim an anarchist commune, and they will of necessity come to it, because they will not be foolish enough to continue making luxurious toys (which Vienna, Warsaw and Berlin make as well already), and to run the risk of being left without bread.
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Moreover, agricultural work, by the help of machinery, would soon become the most attractive and the most joyful of all occupations. ‘We have had enough jewellery and enough dolls’ clothes,’ they would say; ‘it is high time for the workers to recruit their strength in agriculture, to go in search of vigour, of impressions of nature, of the joy of life, that they have forgotten in the dark factories of the suburbs.’ In the Middle Ages it was Alpine pasture lands, rather than guns, which allowed the Swiss to shake off lords and kings. Modern agriculture will allow a city in revolt to free itself from the combined bourgeois forces.
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We have seen how the three and a half million inhabitants of the two departments round Paris could find ample bread by cultivating only a third of their territory. Let us now pass on to cattle.
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Englishmen, who eat much meat, consume on an average a little less than 220 lb. a year per adult. Supposing all meats consumed were oxen, that makes a little less than the third of an ox. An ox a year for five individuals (including children) is already a sufficient ration. For three and a half million inhabitants this would make an annual consumption of 700,000 head of cattle.
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Today, with the pasture system, we need at least five million acres to nourish 660,000 head of cattle. This makes nine acres per each head of horned cattle. Nevertheless, with prairies moderately watered by spring water (as recently done on thousands of acres in the south-west of France), one and a quater million acres already suffice. But if intensive culture is practised, and beet-root is grown for fodder, you only need a quarter of that area, that is to say, about 310,000 acres. And if we have recourse to maize and practise ensilage (the compression of fodder while green) like Arabs, we obtain fodder on an area of 217,500 acres.
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In the environs of Milan, where sewer water is used to irrigate the fields, fodder for two to three horned cattle per each acre is obtained on an area of 22,000 acres; and on a few favoured fields, up to 177 tons of hay to the ten acres have been cropped, the yearly provender of thirty-six milch cows. Nearly nine acres per head of cattle are needed under the pasture system, and only two and a half acres for nine oxen or cows under the new system. These are the opposite extremes in modern agriculture.
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In Guernsey, on a total of 9,884 acres utilized, nearly half (4,695 acres) are covered with cereals and kitchen-gardens; only 5,189 acres remain as meadows. On these 5,189 acres, 1,480 horses, 7,260 head of cattle, 900 sheep and 4,200 pigs are fed, which makes more than three head of cattle per two acres, without reckoning the sheep or the pigs. It is needless to add that the fertility of the soil is made by seaweed and chemical manures.
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Returning to our three and a half million inhabitants belonging to Paris and its environs, we see that the land necessary for the rearing of cattle comes down from five million acres to 197,000. Well, then, let us not stop at the lowest figures, let us take those of ordinary intensive culture; let us liberally add to the land necessary for smaller cattle which must replace some of the horned beasts and allow 395,000 acres for the rearing of cattle – 494,000 if you like, on the 1,013,000 acres remaining after bread has been provided for the people.
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Let us be generous and give five million work-days to put this land into a productive state. After having therefore employed in the course of a year twenty million work-days, half of which are for permanent improvements, we shall have bread and meat assured to us, without including all the extra meat obtainable in the shape of fowls, pigs, rabbits, etc.; without taking into consideration that a population provided with excellent vegetables and fruit consumes less meat than Englishmen, who supplement their poor supply of vegetables by animal food. Now, how much do twenty million work-days of five hours make per inhabitant? Very little indeed. A population of three and a half millions must have at least 1,200,000 adult men, and as many women capable of work. Well, then, to give bread and meat to all, it would need only seventeen half-days of work a year per man. Add three million work-days, or double that number if you like, in order to obtain milk. That will make twenty-five work-days of five hours in all – nothing more than a little pleasurable country exercise – to obtain the three principal products: bread, meat and milk. The three products which, after housing, cause daily anxiety to nine-tenths of mankind.
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And yet – let us not tire of repeating – these are not fancy dreams. We have only told what is, what has been, obtained by experience on a large scale. Agriculture could be reorganized in this way tomorrow if property laws and general ignorance did not offer opposition.
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The day Paris has understood that to know what you eat and how it is produced, is a question of public interest; the day when everybody will have understood that this question is infinitely more important than all the parliamentary debates of the present times – on that day the revolution will be an accomplished fact. Paris will take possession of the two departments and cultivate them. And then the Parisian worker, after having laboured a third of his existence in order to buy bad and insufficient food, will produce it himself, under his walls, within the enclosure of his forts (if they still exist), in a few hours of healthy and attractive work.
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And now we pass on to fruit and vegetables. Let us go outside Paris and visit the establishment of a market-gardener who accomplishes wonders (ignored by learned economists) at a few miles from the academies.
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Let us visit, suppose, M. Ponce, the author of a work on market-gardening, who makes no secret of what the earth yields him, and who has published it all along.
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M. Ponce, and especially his workmen, work like niggers. It takes eight men to cultivate a plot a little less than three acres (2.7). They work twelve, and even fifteen hours a day, that is to say, three times more than is needed. Twenty-four of them would not be too many. To which M. Ponce will probably answer that as he pays the terrible sum of £100 rent a year for his 2.7 acres of land, and £100 for manure bought in the barracks, he is obliged to exploit. He would no doubt answer, ‘Being exploited, I exploit in my turn.’ His installation has also cost him £1,200, of which certainly more than half went as tribute to the idle barons of industry. In reality, this establishment represents at most 3,000 work-days, probably much less.
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But let us examine his crops: nearly ten tons of carrots, nearly ten tons of onions, radishes, and small vegetables, 6,000 heads of cabbage, 3,000 heads of cauliflower, 5,000 baskets of tomatoes, 5,000 dozen of choice fruit, 154,000 salads; in short, a total of 123 tons of vegetables and fruit to 2.7 acres – 120 yards long by 109 yards broad, which makes more than forty-five tons of vegetables to the acre.
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But a man does not eat more than 660 lb. of vegetables and fruit a year, and two and a half acres of a market-garden yield enough vegetables and fruit to richly supply the table of 350 adults during the year. Thus twenty-four persons, employed a whole year in cultivating 2.7 acres of land, and only working five hours a day, would produce sufficient vegetables and fruit for 350 adults, which is equivalent at least to 500 individuals.