Fields, factories and workshops

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

[51] Out of each 1000 acres of territory, 673 are cultivated, and 327 are left as uncultivable, and part of them are now used for afforestation. Out of the 673 cultivated acres, 273 are given to cereals, out of which 61 are under pure wheat, 114 under méteil (a mixture of ⅔ of wheat and ⅓ of rye) and pure rye, and 98 under other cereals; 18 to potatoes, 45 to roots and fodder, and 281 to various industrial cultures (beet for sugar, oleaginous grains, etc.); 27 are under gardens, kitchen gardens and parks, 177 under woods, and 57 are cultivated periodically. On the other hand, each 65 acres out of 1000 give catch-crops of carrots, mangolds, etc.

[52] Annuaire Statistique de la Belgique pour 1910, Bruxelles, 1911. In Mr. Seebohm Rowntree’s admirable work, Land and Labour: Lessons from Belgium, published 1910 (London, Macmillan), the reader will find all concerning Belgian agriculture dealt with in detail on the basis of the author’s personal scrupulous inquiries on the spot, and all available statistical information.

[53] Land and Labour: Lessons from Belgium, pp. 178, 179.

[54] Taking all horses, cattle and sheep in both countries, and reckoning eight sheep as equivalent to one head of horned cattle, we find that Belgium has twenty-four cattle units and horses upon each 100 acres of territory, as against twenty same units and horses in Great Britain. If we take cattle alone, the disproportion is much greater, as we find thirty-six cattle units on each 100 acres of cultivable area, as against nineteen in Great Britain. The annual value of animal produce in Belgium is estimated by the Annuaire Statistique de la Belgique (1910, p. 302) at £66,040,000, including milk (£4,000,000), poultry (£1,600,000), and eggs (£1,400,000).

[55] I take these lines from a letter which the Rural Office of the Belgian Ministry of Agriculture had been kind enough to write to me on January 28, 1910, in reply to some questions which I had addressed to that Office in order to explain the striking oscillations of the Belgian exports between the years 1870 and 1880. A Belgian friend, having kindly taken new information upon this point, had the same opinion confirmed from another official source.

[56] If we take the figures of imports and exports, which I also owe to the Belgian Rural Office, we find that the net imports of wheat, rye, and wheat mixed with rye (méteil) reached 3,011 million lb. in 1907 (3,374 million in 1910), which would give 429 lb. per capita for a population of 7,000,000 inhabitants. But if this amount be added to the local production of the same cereals, which reached the same year 2,426 million lb., we arrive at the figure of 776 lb. per head of population. But such a figure is much too high, because the annual per capita consumption of both the winter and the spring cereals is generally estimated to be 502 lb. There must be, therefore, either an error in the weight of the imports, which is improbable, or the figures of re-exported cereals are not complete. Let me add that in France the average annual consumption per capita of all cereals, including oats, has been in the course of twenty-nine years (1880-1908) 525 lb., which confirms the above-mentioned figure. And in France people eat as much bread as in Belgium.

[57] See [Appendix K].

[58] Assuming that 9,000 lb. of dry hay are necessary for keeping one head of horned cattle every year, the following figures (taken from Toubeau’s Répartition métrique des impôts) will show what we obtain now under usual and under intensive culture:—

	Crop per acre. Eng. lb.	Equivalent in dry hay. Eng. lb.	Number of cattle fed from each 100 acres.
Pasture	—	1,200	13
Unirrigated meadows	—	2,400	26
Clover, cut twice	—	4,800	52
Swedish turnips	38,500	10,000	108
Rye-grass	64,000	18,000	180
Beet, high farming	64,000	21,000	210
Indian corn, ensilage	120,000	30,000	330

[59] I saw thermosiphons used by the market-gardeners at Worthing. They said that they found them quite satisfactory. As to the cost of heating the soil, let me mention the experiments of H. Mehner, described in Gartenflora, fascicules 16 and 17 of the year 1906. He considers the cost quite small, in comparison with the increased value of the crops. With £100 per Morgen, spent for the installation, and £10 every spring for heating, the author estimates the increase in the value of crops (earlier vegetables) at £100 every year. (Report to the German Landwirthschafts Gesellschaft, 1906.)