Agriculture's history: from common land to self-owning farmers

Agriculture is one of mankind's oldest professions. For thousands of years, farmers have plowed, sown and harvested, and almost everything we take for granted today — crop rotation, livestock, tools and fields — has a long history behind it. Knowing that history makes it easier to understand why fields look the way they do and why the profession is organized as it is. This is the story of how Danish agriculture came to be.

§The roots of agriculture

Humans originally lived as hunters and gatherers. When agriculture reached the North thousands of years ago, people settled: forests were cleared, grain was cultivated and livestock was kept. The first fields were worked with a simple tool, the plough — a kind of hook that scratched a furrow in the ground without turning it. The plough did not require much pulling power and suited the light soils that were cultivated at the time. Harvesting was done with sickles, and grain was threshed with flails and ground on hand mills. It was hard, slow work, where virtually everything was done with manual labour and animal muscle power.

§Medieval village community

In the Middle Ages, one of the great leaps occurred. With a milder climate and new techniques from Southern Europe, agriculture developed rapidly. The scratch plough was in many places replaced by the heavy wheel plough, which had wheels and a mould board, so it not only scratched the soil but turned it completely and brought nutrients to the surface. The wheel plough was strong enough to break the heavy clay soil — but it was also heavy to pull and required many draught animals, often oxen.

Because the wheel plow was so cumbersome to turn, it was most rational to plow the field in long, narrow strips to avoid too many turns. This gave the villages' fields their characteristic pattern of long furrows. The farmers lived together in villages and cultivated the land together — a cultivation community where they shared both tools, draft animals, and decisions about what should be grown where.

In many places the three-field system was followed: the village's land was divided into three fields that took turns bearing different crops. On one field for example rye was sown on another barley while the third lay fallow — uncultivated — to rest and gather strength. Each year the crops moved to the next field. It was an early form of crop rotation designed to keep the soil fertile without the knowledge of fertilisation we have today.

§Tenant farmers and bound life

For centuries, most farmers were tenant farmers: they did not own the land themselves, but rented it from a landowner in return for paying taxes and performing corvée labour — obligatory work on the estate's fields. The farmer had little freedom to change the farming, and the common land system meant that the individual could not farm their land as they wished; everything had to be agreed in common. With the stavnsbundet, men were also bound to the estate where they were born, so they could not move freely. It was a hard and locked life with little incentive to improve the land.

§The agrarian reforms — the peasant becomes free and independent

At the end of the 1700s came one of the most profound shifts in Danish agricultural history: the agricultural reforms. A circle of reform-minded landowners and officials — including the Reventlow brothers, the jurist Christian Colbjørnsen and foreign minister A.P. Bernstorff — pushed through a series of reforms intended to liberate and improve the conditions of farmers.

• 01Stavnsbåndet blev ophævet i 1788 (helt udfaset i begyndelsen af 1800-tallet), så bønderne frit kunne flytte og søge arbejde, hvor de ville.
• 02The redistribution collected each farm's scattered plots of land into one continuous field so the community's compulsion was broken.
• 03Mange gårde blev flyttet ud af de tætte landsbyer og lagt ude på deres egen jord — de såkaldte udflyttergårde.
• 04Farmers gradually gained the opportunity to own their land themselves instead of leasing it.

When the peasant now tilled his own collected land and could keep the fruit of his labour he had for the first time a strong reason to improve operations drain gout and grow new. The landscape changed visibly as the old village clusters were spread out in single farms. The reforms laid the groundwork for the owner-operated family farm that for more than a century became the backbone of Danish agriculture.

§The cooperative movement – common strength

At the end of the 1800s, the many small independent farmers found a new way to unite. In 1882, farmers in Hjedding near Varde established the world's first cooperative dairy: instead of each churning butter on their own farm, they delivered their milk to a shared dairy, where modern equipment could produce uniform butter of high quality. The principle was simple and became a model for the entire movement: each member had one vote regardless of the size of their herd, surplus was distributed according to how much milk one delivered, and they were jointly liable — 'one for all, all for one'.

The idea spread at lightning speed. Within a few years, cooperative dairies sprang up across the country, and soon followed cooperative slaughterhouses, cooperative purchasing associations and much else. The cooperative idea made it possible for small farmers to share in the advantages of large-scale operations without losing their independence, and it made Danish food products like butter and bacon into known export commodities. Traces of the cooperative movement continue in today's large agriculture-owned businesses.

“With the land reforms the farmer became master of his own land — and with the cooperative movement the many small farmers learned to stand together as one. The two movements together shaped Danish agriculture.”

— Professional overview

Towards the 1900s, Danish agriculture therefore stood on a completely new foundation: free, self-owning farmers who cultivated their own land and cooperated in cooperative associations. It was from here that the technical revolution in the following century took its start.