The Rise, Fall and Revival of Small Farms in the 20th century in the Netherlands and the rest of Europe by Ceren Bagatar 20th Century Agricultural Economy and Politics, Department of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU Upsala 2021
Background The green revolution and the rise of small farms Modern economic growth had begun in western Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century and accelerated after 1850 attracting the labor force, increasing the wages and hindering the agricultural growth. Until 1870, farmers had been increasing the labor input and replacing the fallows with legumes to raise the farm output and cope with the growing population and the land scarcity (van Zanden,1991). Mechanization and modernization of production could have replaced labor input favoring the large farms and rendering the small-farmers wage workers. However, the opposite had happened with a remarkable rise in number of small family farms and leading to gradual disappearance of large scale farming based on wage work (van Zanden,1991). One explanation given by Koning is that the available farming technology by then couldn’t start a revolutionary reduction of cost of production, mainly because scattered ownership of land would hinder the application of such technology. Large farms were also reluctant in investing in innovation, because as return on innovation investment became lower, financing innovation became more difficult for them (Koning, 1994: 25-27).