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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1512 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 10, 2024

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AIUI American homesteads starting in the late 19th century were the most prosperous example of subsistence farmer ever in the history of the world, and the gap in per farmer productivity vs the old country opened up very early.

Was this an artifact of social equality? Of more land per farmer? Of better access to markets due to settlement patterns?

Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization is precisely about this. Here's a book review which answers your question: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-energy-and-civilization-by

More (good!) land per farmer plus mechanical reapers. If you didn't know, harvesting ripe grain used to be the limiting factor for farm sizes: it's a very short time frame when your wheat is ripe and dry and not falling off the stalk. It's a lot of literally back-breaking labor to cut the stalks and tie them into sheafs since you cannot use horsepower to do that, so the amount of grain you can harvest is limited by the size of your family that abandons all other activities and spends whole days in the field, young and old alike.

With a mechanical reaper you could reap the way you ploughed and sowed: by walking behind a horse, the reaper cutting and baling the wheat for you. A typical Midwestern farmer could harvest a massive surplus of grain, turning him from a subsistence farmer into a businessman.

plus mechanical reapers.

Well yes, this is a relevant factor in the late Victorian era. But the per farmer productivity gap opened very early.

Could the difference be corn or higher solar indexes than northern Europe?

Can you clarify what group you mean when you talk about American subsistence farmers? Where most of my ancestors came from in Europe, the average peasant farm was IIRC around 3 acres, and they paid high taxes to the local lord and the various higher levels of government. When they came to America, the smallest farm any of them had was either 40 or 80 acres, plus they had a vastly lower tax bill. Even though they were initially hard up, I don’t think it would be accurate to call any of them subsistence farmers after the first few years.

Were there actually long-term subsistence farmers out further south and west, where the land is less fertile?

Yes. Subsistence farming hung on in America surprisingly late; LBJ famously grew up on a subsistence farm in the Texas hill country- some of the worst grain growing land of its climate anywhere. And of course the Deep South had lots of the population living as subsistence farmers until Jim Crow- my great-grandfather recounted them as a major presence after WWII.

I think it’s accurate to call into question how wealthy it’s possible to be and stay a subsistence farmer- Little House on the Prairie is about a family’s transition to commercial production to take advantage of greater access to markets before it becomes a romance novel, but it’s quite clear that the Ingallses are farming because the alternative to growing enough food is not eating in the early books, and later on after buying a mechanical reaper they eagerly take advantage of markets.

I'm assuming more land per farmer was a superpower.

This would allow a farmer to have a large number of animals which both provide food directly and create fertilizer.

Better land (and climate) per farmer. Land farmed in the old world was either owned by aristocracy or very marginal.

Going to the new world was like being handed the best farmland the richest nobles had, literally for free. Of course the farms were productive.

Imagine everyone in Italy died from the black death and you could set up shop in the Po valley for free, would you be more productive than in some cold German marsh, the Scottish highlands or the Scandinavian inland?

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