CHAYANO--CH 4--CLARK

It was particularly interesting to me to learn about everything that goes into the organization of field cultivation (pg. 134). Of course we learned about the importance of crop rotation in middle school, but I never knew there were so many other factors to take into account when planning a farm. Chayanov mentions the importance of planting “not only commodity crops… but also crops to meet the family’s needs in kind” (134) as well as the significance of keeping an even distribution of labor throughout the year.

However, one of the most interesting charts in my opinion in this data-filled chapter is table 4-14 on page 135: Net income of two-hundred-fifty hectare farm (thousand marks). This table shows how drastically a farms income decreases the farther away from the market they get, regardless of farm system or category of fertility. Apart from pointing out something that I definitely understand but would have never thought of, this table raised some questions in my head: were these farms that were so close to the market also larger farms? But then, isn’t that a bit counter-intuitive if you imagine farms farther away from the city would have more usable land? At what point did the transportation to the market not make such a profound impact on income? Did the farms that were much farther away from the market than others (200 and 400 kilometers, especially) actually hope to make big profits on their crops in that market setting, or did they mainly grow their own food and take the occasional trip by railway to the market?