Among the capitalists we notice the timber speculator, who purchases tracts without ploughland, or, perhaps, sells the latter to the small farmer. Yet, with all that, three-fourths of the total area acquired by the capitalist class are farmed by the owners. Practical business men who invest their money in large estates, would undoubtedly prefer to quietly pocket the enormous rents paid by the peasants, if in reality agriculture on a large scale had proved a loss, as both the nobility and the peasantists claimed.[169]

Moreover, the management of the estates by the capitalists is far superior to that which the noble landlord could afford.

The capitalist would manure his fields as soon as his holding reaches scarcely one-half the average estate on which the nobleman would care to fertilize the soil; and even then the latter lags behind the capitalist as regards the area yearly manured:

Estates with large agriculture.Number of estates.Average (dessiatines).Area under cultivation.
Dessiatines.Once in how many years manured?
Total.Per cent.Yearly manured.
Property of the nobility:100
Farming with manure1048162849592255511.1
Farming without manure1928024158
Property of the capitalist class:100
Farming with manure453635314858256.4
Farming without manure2213895815

The expense of fertilizing is compensated by the greater productivity of capitalistic agriculture.

We observe that wheat is planted by the capitalist where rye would be the only winter crop raised by a nobleman:

Estates with large agriculture.Number.Average
(Dessiatines).
Property of the nobility:
Wheat grown72898
No wheat grown51501
Property of the capitalist class:
Wheat grown22478
No wheat grown45197

Of much greater consequence is, moreover, the fact that the yields of wheat are by far higher on capitalistic farms than on the estates of the nobility[170]: