Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 94, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 April 1914 — AGRICULTURE IN RUSSIA [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

AGRICULTURE IN RUSSIA

N a country of such vast dimensions as that ruled 1 over by the czar, the methods of agriculture nhturally vary enormously in the different districts; but during a visit of three weeks’ duration —a visit now jußt drawing to a close —I have been able to see a good

?leal of the methods of the Russian 'peasant and landowner. In the Petersburg district scientific agriculture is practically unknown. Here the summer is too short to allow the successful raising of crops, and tillage is confined to the lands belonging to the village communities. In Russia practically every village is staterowned—that is, under the control of no landlord, and every village has within its bounds a certain acreage of common land. The inhabitants of the village have each one a fixed amount of this land assigned to them; but, to avoid favoritism, a peasant does not farm the same strip ________

two seasons running, but a rotation is practised whereby each member of the village in time goes over the whole land of the community. The birth of a son is a source of great joy on the part of a Russian peasant, for on such an occasion an extra grant of land is given to him. In the north of Russia wheat is never grown. Oats are produced, but rye is

the staple crop, and It Is from this cereal that the peasant makes his bread. The is put into the ground in September, and thus is able to make a start before the advent of the winter snow, early in November. Between Petersburg and Moscow agriculture is in a primitive condition. 'The fields are extremely small and have a neglected appearance, while the houses of the villagers are in a dirty condition, the cattle and pigs in some instances sharing the dwellings with their owners. The rotation here practised is rye, oats and then fallow, to allow the land to recover somewhat. Proceeding south, however, one finds better conditions prevailing. The fields become larger, wheat takes the place of rye, and one gradually enters the enormous wheat producing district of Russia. Passing through this district, which extends from fcharkoff to the beginning of the Crimean peninsula, for hundreds of miles the country, as far as the eye can reach, is given over almost entirely to the raising of cereal crops. The fields are enormous, more than one field stretchiilg for several miles by the railway line, and

as the whole district is sparsely populated, the problem at once presents itself: From where are the landowners to obtain an adequate supply of labor? They mußt depend entirely on the services of the villagers, and as the latter are quite independent of ;them, they have no power to, force ithem to work should they be disinclined to do so. An instance of this occurred a short time back. A landlord who owned a farm of 40,000 acres lhad a fine crop of 900 acres of beets. When the time arrived for the harvesting of these roots the peasants of the village—op the excuse that, as their own harvest was an abundant one, there was.no necessity for them to work —point blank refused to do the harvesting of the. beets, and the whole of the country had to be scoured —naturally, at considerable expense—to procure laborers. Throughout the extensive corn-growing district referred to above there is an almost entire absence of root crops, with the exception of beets, and only a very small proportion of the land is under grass or hay. How the stock can be maintained under these conditions through the winter months is difficult to understand, but the animalß seen were in poor condition as compared with the English cattle. The most important breed of Russian cow is the Yaroslav, but on the estate where the writer has been staying the stock consisted of Jersey cattle, and crosses between these latter and the Yaroslav are looked on favorably. English pigs, Yorkshire and Tam worth, are also kept Very little Btock is kept on the majority of Russian farms. As well as the cereal crops, one frequently noted fields given over to the raising of sunflowers. These are reared for the productiop of salad oil, which is used extensively during Lent, and the. seeds ' are also eaten largely by the poorer classes. The farm of a village community 1b easy to distinguish from that owned by the landlord, from the fact that the former is invariably in narrow strips. On

this common land the whole of the cattle and sheep of the village are pastured together, looked ofter by one of the villagers, and the mixed stock presented a remarkably pretty sight. On the large farms horses are largely employed for plowing, and one often saw a young foal following its mother patiently up and down the furrows. A noteworthy point is the entire absence of hedges—as far as the eye can reach, field after field stretches away with monotonous regularity, often not so much as a single tree breaking the uninteresting landscape. Comparatively little of the cereal straw 1b stored up, but most of it is burnt in the engines driving the threshing machines. Where farming is practised on so extensive a scale as in the wheat-growing districts of Russia, the farmer naturally is unable to have his servants under his eye, and cases are on record of farm laborers carting the corn to their own standings instead of those of their employer. The absence of any organized system of manuring the fields is all the more evident after one has passed through the rich agricultural district of Eastern Austria. In Russia, I have it on the” authority of an eye-witness that a certain heap of manure exists of the age of no less than sixty years, and no steps are ever taken to distribute it over the fields. Again, the peasants actually use their manure in

making embankments over gullies, these embankments being ironically known as “golden bridges." The Russians depend mainly on leaving their fields periodically fallow for the recuperation of the soil, and a certain! amount of good is also effected by the grazing of the rye by the stock in early spring—the wheat and oats are never put into the land in the autumn, and so are not grazed. A point perhaps worth noting is the/fact that'lit- . tie land is under leguminous crops, which enrich the soil by virtub of their power of fix*

ing atmospheric nitrogen, so a powerful factor in the amelioration of the land is absent. * A large proportion of the wheat grown in the South Central district of Russia is exported to England and Germany from the port of Odessa by steamers which reach that port with cargoes of coal. On several occasions, on the journey from Moscow to the Crimea, we saw a dead pig enveloped in burning straw, and learned that the pig, as soon as killed, is placed on straw, which Is then set fire to in order to burn the animal’s hair. After the desolate and monotonous country of the wheat producing district, one was most favorably impressed by the Crimea. The Crimea may be said to be the wine and fruit-producing district for the whole of Russia, and at the moment I am writing these lines (April 27) the vines are just cojnmencing to shoot. The Crimea is essentially a land of hills, and it is on these hillsides that the vines are grown. Cereals are produced only in small quantities—the climate is too dry and the soil too rocky to permit of extensive operations in this line. A little wheat and oats are grown, and occasionally one sees a field of rye already bursting into ear, while far up the hillsides orchards with fruit trees—apple, pear, apricot, plumladen with blossom, throw their perfumes far over the land.