5Growth or Stability
Peasants in medieval England participated in a common-field farming approach that consisted of three great fields. In any given year, the great fields would be designated for wheat or barley, or were left fallow in a rotation understood to maintain optimal soil conditions. By foregoing immediate production and giving a field time to recover, overall yields would be more stable and secure. It was a tradeoff between short-term production capacity and long-term stability, with the peasants opting for stability.
What is more interesting is how these great fields were subdivided among the peasants. Instead of each having their own contiguous section, each peasant would have up to a dozen scattered plots throughout. They would tend to each of these, shunning a consolidation of holdings for an approach that involved burning precious calories walking between plots.
A similar approach has been witnessed in modern times in the Andean mountains of Peru. There the subsistence farmers would likewise scatter their plots over a large area, walking long distances in between to tend to each one. Development experts studying this situation concluded that the Peruvians were paying “intolerably high” costs for all this inefficiency, something more advanced people would not do.
The peasant’s cumulative agricultural efficiency is so appalling . . . that our amazement is how these people even survive at all.1
The expert recommendation was to create a land swapping program so ...
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