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glaurung(note: A lot of this is inspired by the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog's series last fall on premodern subsistence farming, and especially their addendum on rice)
Premodern subsistence farmers organized their farms not around maximizing yield, but around doing all they could to ensure their family did not starve. Extended families of 8-ish people would farm just a couple hectares of land. Over time large farms would shrink as siblings each took their share of an inheritance, until they hit the minimum size farm needed to produce enough food for everyone. This is true of all premodern farmers, from China to Europe. Everything was organized around guaranteeing, as much as possible, that no one in the family would starve between one harvest and the next. Each family would would work several small fields scattered around the village where they lived, with each field in a different terrain with a different microclimate. If one area around the village had too much or too little water in a year, or if one hillside was blighted by disease or pests, everyone in the village would be a little worse off but no families would face complete destruction. Reducing the risk of starvation was the main priority, not producing a surplus of food to feed to non-farmers.
Staying alive was a community effort. If one farm was pillaged (legally by the aristocracy or illegally by bandits), suffered a sudden death, or had an unusually bad harvest despite its scattered fields, other families in the village would help out. It's common to talk about this in capitalist terms, but that projects modern economic concepts of money and debt onto a past that was not capitalist but communalist. Money debt and a market economy existed, of course, but it was imposed on the farmers and the village community from above by the wealthy and by the towns and cities that sold vital speciality goods to the farmers nearby.
All of that is universal regardless of what the farmers are growing. But the requirements of rice and wheat farming produced vastly different social systems and vastly different societies.
In premodern Europe, plowing with animals was the norm... but no subsistence farmer had hectares to spare to pasture those animals. While communities did maintain common pasture areas, the norm was for the aristocracy, who did own lots of land, to rent out their draft animals to the local farmers. The large landowners would also tend to have the money needed to build mills that could turn wheat into flour, saving a huge amount of work in food preparation, for a price. From a very early era, the farming economy in Europe became focused on ways that farmers could pay a fee to reduce the amount of work needed to bring in enough food to feed their family.
Every step from greco-roman times to the dawn of the industrial age in Europe just intensified the trend - Horses are stronger and faster draft animals than oxen, but need more pasture, making them even harder for villagers to afford. Mouldboard plows do a better job of aerating the soil and suppressing weeds, but can't be built at home from wood - you need a blacksmith, who doesn't work for free. Heavy deep plows need more horses to pull them than light shallow ones. And once again, it was mainly landlords were in a position to provide the necessary animals and equipment. By owning vital parts of the technological infrastructure that the farmers needed to survive, the ruling class placed farmers in a position to force them to do double work (either by selling part of their crop, or with in-kind labour) for the same subsistence-level return. And that continues to this day, with Western farmers often finding themselves deeply in debt to banks for all the extremely expensive mechanized equipment they need in order to barely scrape by.
Rice cultivation in South and East Asia went down a very different path: instead of paying to reduce the labour needed to feed their families, farmers traded more labour for higher yields.
Like all wetland plants, rice seeds don't germinate underwater, so you need to plant it in non-flooded soil. Once the seeds germinate, it doesn't need to be flooded to thrive, but flooding the field drowns all the upland weeds, reduces the need for fertilizer, and ensures that the rice never goes thirsty, eliminating one avenue of crop failure. So farmers build irrigation systems, level their fields and surround them with earthworks to create floodable rice paddies. Planting seeds, waiting for them to sprout, then flooding the fields uses excess seed and doesn't always space the rice plants optimally, so farmers plant the rice in non-flooded germination beds, then transplant the sprouts into the paddies - this also makes it possible to virtually eliminate flood-tolerant weeds. Once the seedlings are transplanted, constant monitoring of the water level throughout the growing season helps ensure the rice produces the most possible grain per hectare.
Every step in the process of traditional rice farming trades extra work -often tons of extra work - for more edible rice grown per hectare. Pre-industrial rice paddy farming produced about twice as much food per hectare as wheat farming. Instead of 2 hectares, a rice farming family of 8 would only need one hectare to feed themselves.
That isn't the end of the story, though: wheat is fussy - it can't be grown where the soil is too dry, too wet, or too poor in nutrients. Lots of land in pre-modern Europe got used for pasture or low-yield supplemental crops because you couldn't grow grain on it. Rice, on the other hand, can be grown anywhere that you can convert into rice paddies. Regular flooding changes the soil chemistry to be more conducive to rice, and aquatic creatures enter the fields with the irrigation water and fertilize the soil with their poop. With enough manual labour and enough water, you can transform poor soil and unusable land into fertile rice fields in a way that just isn't possible with dry land crops like wheat.
This, not lack of family planning, is what explains the higher population density of countries in the rice belt - The more rice each bit of land can produce, the less land a family needs to feed itself, the more farmers can live in a given area, and the more people you have available to plant and harvest rice. In between planting and harvesting, and in the dry/cold seasons, once they do maintenance on the existing paddy and irrigation infrastructure, all those people can work on other projects, like creating terraced fields and more irrigation on the hillsides where they can grow even more rice. The population keeps increasing, more and more land gets converted into rice fields, which lets the population increase more, and so on, until you run out of irrigation water, or run out of land that can be terraced into paddies with the technology available. Rice, and rice paddy technology, enabled premodern China, India, and Southeast Asia to become vastly more densely populated than Europe.
The synergies for rice farming all acted to push for ever more labour investment rather than buying labour saving technologies. To keep fields flooded you had to plow lightly and shallowly - go too deep and the blade slices through the hardpan of clay under the field, letting the water drain into the water table and threatening to leave the rice high and dry. So rice farmers continued to use lightweight wooden plows they built at home, drawn by hand or with the help of a cow or two. Rice doesn't need to be ground - all the processing to make it cookable can be easily done by the farmers with home made devices.
In the rice belt of Asia, farmers did not have to pay their lords a fee in order to keep their families fed. They were self-sufficient in a way their wheat-raising counterparts were not and could not be. And at the same time their communities engaged in multigenerational projects to create more farmable land, projects that were simply impossible for their wheat-raising counterprarts in Europe. I don't know enough about the history of China and other rice-based nations to say much about the impact this had on the very different histories of the two regions, but it does give food for thought.
One last thing: traditional farming in Europe and America is all but extinct. Essentially no one still grows wheat in order to eat it themselves, and all farmers, even the Amish, are more concerned with producing crops to sell than with feeding themselves. Farming families work far more than two hectares, and they don't worry about divvying up fields into small bits to minimize microclimate failure. In the rice belt, on the other hand, modern farmers still farm in the traditional way. They use fertilizer and high yield breeds of rice which let them produce a large surplus to sell, but the essential system - of small fields created with vast amounts of labour, flooded and farmed with even more labour - remains the same.
Premodern subsistence farmers organized their farms not around maximizing yield, but around doing all they could to ensure their family did not starve. Extended families of 8-ish people would farm just a couple hectares of land. Over time large farms would shrink as siblings each took their share of an inheritance, until they hit the minimum size farm needed to produce enough food for everyone. This is true of all premodern farmers, from China to Europe. Everything was organized around guaranteeing, as much as possible, that no one in the family would starve between one harvest and the next. Each family would would work several small fields scattered around the village where they lived, with each field in a different terrain with a different microclimate. If one area around the village had too much or too little water in a year, or if one hillside was blighted by disease or pests, everyone in the village would be a little worse off but no families would face complete destruction. Reducing the risk of starvation was the main priority, not producing a surplus of food to feed to non-farmers.
Staying alive was a community effort. If one farm was pillaged (legally by the aristocracy or illegally by bandits), suffered a sudden death, or had an unusually bad harvest despite its scattered fields, other families in the village would help out. It's common to talk about this in capitalist terms, but that projects modern economic concepts of money and debt onto a past that was not capitalist but communalist. Money debt and a market economy existed, of course, but it was imposed on the farmers and the village community from above by the wealthy and by the towns and cities that sold vital speciality goods to the farmers nearby.
All of that is universal regardless of what the farmers are growing. But the requirements of rice and wheat farming produced vastly different social systems and vastly different societies.
In premodern Europe, plowing with animals was the norm... but no subsistence farmer had hectares to spare to pasture those animals. While communities did maintain common pasture areas, the norm was for the aristocracy, who did own lots of land, to rent out their draft animals to the local farmers. The large landowners would also tend to have the money needed to build mills that could turn wheat into flour, saving a huge amount of work in food preparation, for a price. From a very early era, the farming economy in Europe became focused on ways that farmers could pay a fee to reduce the amount of work needed to bring in enough food to feed their family.
Every step from greco-roman times to the dawn of the industrial age in Europe just intensified the trend - Horses are stronger and faster draft animals than oxen, but need more pasture, making them even harder for villagers to afford. Mouldboard plows do a better job of aerating the soil and suppressing weeds, but can't be built at home from wood - you need a blacksmith, who doesn't work for free. Heavy deep plows need more horses to pull them than light shallow ones. And once again, it was mainly landlords were in a position to provide the necessary animals and equipment. By owning vital parts of the technological infrastructure that the farmers needed to survive, the ruling class placed farmers in a position to force them to do double work (either by selling part of their crop, or with in-kind labour) for the same subsistence-level return. And that continues to this day, with Western farmers often finding themselves deeply in debt to banks for all the extremely expensive mechanized equipment they need in order to barely scrape by.
Rice cultivation in South and East Asia went down a very different path: instead of paying to reduce the labour needed to feed their families, farmers traded more labour for higher yields.
Like all wetland plants, rice seeds don't germinate underwater, so you need to plant it in non-flooded soil. Once the seeds germinate, it doesn't need to be flooded to thrive, but flooding the field drowns all the upland weeds, reduces the need for fertilizer, and ensures that the rice never goes thirsty, eliminating one avenue of crop failure. So farmers build irrigation systems, level their fields and surround them with earthworks to create floodable rice paddies. Planting seeds, waiting for them to sprout, then flooding the fields uses excess seed and doesn't always space the rice plants optimally, so farmers plant the rice in non-flooded germination beds, then transplant the sprouts into the paddies - this also makes it possible to virtually eliminate flood-tolerant weeds. Once the seedlings are transplanted, constant monitoring of the water level throughout the growing season helps ensure the rice produces the most possible grain per hectare.
Every step in the process of traditional rice farming trades extra work -often tons of extra work - for more edible rice grown per hectare. Pre-industrial rice paddy farming produced about twice as much food per hectare as wheat farming. Instead of 2 hectares, a rice farming family of 8 would only need one hectare to feed themselves.
That isn't the end of the story, though: wheat is fussy - it can't be grown where the soil is too dry, too wet, or too poor in nutrients. Lots of land in pre-modern Europe got used for pasture or low-yield supplemental crops because you couldn't grow grain on it. Rice, on the other hand, can be grown anywhere that you can convert into rice paddies. Regular flooding changes the soil chemistry to be more conducive to rice, and aquatic creatures enter the fields with the irrigation water and fertilize the soil with their poop. With enough manual labour and enough water, you can transform poor soil and unusable land into fertile rice fields in a way that just isn't possible with dry land crops like wheat.
This, not lack of family planning, is what explains the higher population density of countries in the rice belt - The more rice each bit of land can produce, the less land a family needs to feed itself, the more farmers can live in a given area, and the more people you have available to plant and harvest rice. In between planting and harvesting, and in the dry/cold seasons, once they do maintenance on the existing paddy and irrigation infrastructure, all those people can work on other projects, like creating terraced fields and more irrigation on the hillsides where they can grow even more rice. The population keeps increasing, more and more land gets converted into rice fields, which lets the population increase more, and so on, until you run out of irrigation water, or run out of land that can be terraced into paddies with the technology available. Rice, and rice paddy technology, enabled premodern China, India, and Southeast Asia to become vastly more densely populated than Europe.
The synergies for rice farming all acted to push for ever more labour investment rather than buying labour saving technologies. To keep fields flooded you had to plow lightly and shallowly - go too deep and the blade slices through the hardpan of clay under the field, letting the water drain into the water table and threatening to leave the rice high and dry. So rice farmers continued to use lightweight wooden plows they built at home, drawn by hand or with the help of a cow or two. Rice doesn't need to be ground - all the processing to make it cookable can be easily done by the farmers with home made devices.
In the rice belt of Asia, farmers did not have to pay their lords a fee in order to keep their families fed. They were self-sufficient in a way their wheat-raising counterparts were not and could not be. And at the same time their communities engaged in multigenerational projects to create more farmable land, projects that were simply impossible for their wheat-raising counterprarts in Europe. I don't know enough about the history of China and other rice-based nations to say much about the impact this had on the very different histories of the two regions, but it does give food for thought.
One last thing: traditional farming in Europe and America is all but extinct. Essentially no one still grows wheat in order to eat it themselves, and all farmers, even the Amish, are more concerned with producing crops to sell than with feeding themselves. Farming families work far more than two hectares, and they don't worry about divvying up fields into small bits to minimize microclimate failure. In the rice belt, on the other hand, modern farmers still farm in the traditional way. They use fertilizer and high yield breeds of rice which let them produce a large surplus to sell, but the essential system - of small fields created with vast amounts of labour, flooded and farmed with even more labour - remains the same.