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(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. ( Read more... )
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. ( Read more... )
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.
