Agriculture

Opening a special department for agriculture in the scientific and literary magazine, the editors are guided by the idea that in our time and especially in our fatherland, the science of agriculture is no longer limited exclusively to industrial purposes, but in a deeper development belongs to those issues of human education that come into contact with the most living objects of thought and with the most abstract objects of life. The time has long passed when agriculture was exclusively a matter of established custom and old tradition. But the unconscious habit of antiquity was followed by an unconscious love of innovation. At that time, nothing had yet changed in the rural order of things, therefore nothing required a change in the previous economic structure; Only the way of thinking of some landowners changed, and as a result of this abstract reason, foreign systems began to be borrowed, born there out of special local circumstances and introduced here often contrary to local requirements. Sometimes rotating farms were established, where an excess of land and a lack of hands indicated the exact opposite arrangement. They sowed potatoes in huge quantities where there was nowhere to sell even grain bread. They produced complex tools that did not meet local needs. The pedantic improvement of a small piece of land, which does not yet have a high price in Russia, was purchased with an important loss of time, especially valuable in our agriculture. They broke old customs not for new benefits, but for a new system. They introduced increased work and often excessively aggravated corvee labor where the previous one was more profitable even for the landowner. The former natural character of rural relations was replaced by the character of factory tension. They spent huge amounts of capital to obtain works of little value. Many ruined their peasants. Many aroused in them the idea of ​​the disparity of their benefits with the interests of the landowner manufacturer. Others went bankrupt themselves. Very few limited their losses to the loss of uselessly spent labor and effort - until, finally, the general failures of the fashionably rational owners produced a completely opposite direction in the general opinion of the landowners. Just as before they were looking for everything new, considering every innovation an improvement, so now they began to fear any improvement because it was an innovation. Excessive trust in systems has turned into excessive distrust of thinking. We do not share either direction. We admit, however, that if we had to certainly choose from the two, we would have more sympathy for the latter; for we think that improvements require not so much the speed of innovation as their thoroughness, and that any improvement is not so much harmed by stubborn remaining in an insufficient but already existing situation - from which a person, even without an abstract system, is involuntarily forced out by the very order of things moving around him - as it is harmed by the inappropriateness of immature new devices, the failure of which strengthens the beginning of rural immobility with the full weight of disappointed expectation. Meanwhile, in our time, the main issues of agriculture are no longer in the same position as they were at the beginning of our innovative experiments. If then the reason for the changes in the economy was the personal predilections of some owners for foreign theories, now, on the contrary, the very order of rural things requires some changes in their structure. The incredible, hitherto unheard of and in all cases ruinous for farmers, variability in the value of their products; the difficulty of living with excessive prices; no less difficulty in obtaining the necessary taxes and dues given the extreme cheapness of bread; the recent spread of manufactures and factories, partly natural, more intensely artificial and in the latter case not developing gradually, but instantly changing the morals of the people; the spread of new luxury needs among the poorest class of both capitals and many cities, with which rural farmers are in constant contact; in some places, an increased population and the resulting different relationship between the value of work and land; finally, examples and consequences of improved economy among state peasants - all these and many other circumstances in our time connect the issues of each private economy with questions about the development of the economy in our fatherland in general, and make the need for some improvements no longer a predilection for some individuals, but a general necessity of all rural life. In this state of affairs, the science of agriculture is no longer associated only with chemistry, botany, technology, mechanics and similar knowledge, but necessarily includes moral-statistical, and partly even historical considerations. Moreover, the most industrial part of agriculture, after previous one-sided theories, must take on a new meaning in order to acquire new confidence. Of the two elements which constitute the true science of economics, experience and intelligent knowledge of foreign systems and discoveries seem to be both equally necessary. But knowledge of other people's systems can only be beneficial when it is not subject to partiality towards one, which is accidentally better known, but combines the study of all the most important and most opposing ones, together with distrust of the exclusivity of each individual one. Here half-knowledge is more harmful than ignorance. an impartial consideration of different theories and still more different practices, in different states and under different local circumstances, necessarily has this effect on the observing mind, that general truths are detached from the accidental circumstances that give them one-sided application, and are no longer German, not English, not Belgian and not French; everything limited falls away from them, as dependent on local influences, and the pure principle is thus presented in that rational form in which it can already, as its own consideration, be subject to the conscious calculation of any thinking owner. Thus, if half-knowledge is more harmful than ignorance, then knowledge saves from the harm of half-knowledge. The articles of Mr. Professor Linovsky will have the primary goal of showing the current state of agriculture in various European countries, with the constant thought of the possibility of impartial application of general principles and discoveries in this area to the improvement of agriculture in our fatherland. He had the opportunity to reinforce and confirm his thorough theoretical knowledge of the science of agriculture and related sciences with long trips around Russia, undertaken exclusively for this purpose. Not before, armed with such knowledge and observations, he began to study on the spot the improved farms of Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, France and especially England, a country to which improvements were known to us more by rumor than by conscientious research in reality. That is why the editors of the magazine consider the constant participation of such an employee to be an important acquisition. But at the same time, she expects the assistance of some other experienced Russian masters, so that by combining forces she can hope to achieve a generally beneficial result. You might be interested in: