Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

The twelve shillings a week of the British agricultural labourer represents the same amount of wheat in Britain as the six shillings a week of the Russian labourer represents in Russia.

Crops of from sixteen to twenty-three bushels per acre are considered good crops in Russia, while the average hardly reaches thirteen bushels, even in the corn-exporting parts of the empire.

Besides, the amount of labour which is necessary to grow wheat in Russia with no thrashing-machines, with a plough dragged by a horse hardly worth the name, with no roads for transport, and so on, is certainly much greater than the amount…

But the difference of the land rent in both countries would alone account for the difference of prices.

The false condition of British rural economy, not the infertility of the soil, is thus the chief cause of the Russian competition.

Society at large remains indifferent to the needs of British agriculture.

It must not be forgotten that the competition of American wheat has made the same havoc in the agriculture of most European countries--especially in France and Belgium; but in the last two countries the adaptations which were necessary to…

Both in Belgium and in France the American imports gave a new impetus toward a more intensive utilisation of the soil, and this impetus was strongest in Belgium, where no attempt was made to protect agriculture by an increase of the import…

Under such a system of culture the soil was soon exhausted, the crop declined, and intensive agriculture (which aims at high crops on a limited area) had soon to be resorted to.

But the soil was already exhausted, and when a disease came the wheat plants had no force to resist it.

In a few weeks nearly all the wheat crop, which was expected to beat all previous records, was lost; eight to ten bushels per acre of bad wheat were all that could be cropped.

The result was that “mammoth farms” had to be broken up into small farms, and that the Iowa farmers (after a terrible crisis of short duration--everything is rapid in America) took to a more intensive culture.

Somehow, with the aid of manure and improved methods of farming, they compete admirably with the mammoth farms of the Far West.

In short, in Manitoba one is especially struck with the fact that, even under a system of keen competition, the middle-size farm has completely beaten the old mammoth farm, and that it is not manufacturing wheat on a grand scale which pays…

It is also most interesting to note that thousands and thousands of farmers produce mountains of wheat in the Canadian province of Toronto and in the Eastern States, although the land is not prairie-land at all, and the farms are, as a…

It lies in the ownership of the land, in a system of culture which is appropriate to the character of the country, in a widely developed spirit of association, and, finally, in a number of institutions and customs intended to lift the…

American agriculture really offers an imposing sight--not in the wheat fields of the Far West, which soon will become a thing of the past, but in the development of rational agriculture and the forces which promote it.

Intensive” agriculture and gardening are already by this time as much a feature of the treatment of the soil in America as they are in Belgium.

In this adaptability lies the real force of American competition.

In truth, the problem of cultivating the land with the least number of men has been solved in this spot by not cultivating at all as much as two-thirds of it.

On the other hand, it was discovered lately that certain microbes in the soil are a necessary condition for the growth of plants.

I do not quote many excellent English manuals, but I must remark that the market-gardening culture in this country has also obtained results very highly prized by the Continental gardeners, and that the chief reproach to be addressed to it…

Manures, containing only one-fifth part of the nutritious elements they were supposed to contain, were found to be quite common; while manures containing injurious matters, and no nutritious parts whatever, were not unfrequently supplied…

William Saunders, is quite right in saying that this system of supplying a great number of farmers with small quantities of choice seeds has contributed notably to increase the yield of corn in Canada.

And the division and subdivision--the permanent subdivision--of functions has been pushed so far as to divide humanity into castes which are almost as firmly established as those of old India.