Measuring the Production of Grain Companies of the Small Farmers in the Paris Region
Type de matériel :
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Thanks to the work of Jean-Marc Moriceau and Gilles Postel-Vinay, we know relatively well how large farms of the Paris Basin performed in terms of grain growing during the 19th century. However, we know very little about the performance of smaller ones. The goal of this paper is to review the available information drawn from the posthumous inventories of 103 agricultural operators so as to build a picture of their grain growing performances in two distinct areas—Vexin and Marines—during two different periods, the beginning of the Restoration and the early years of the Second Empire. Since it is almost always impossible to assess yields for grain obtained by small farmers, we propose to replace them with a composite financial index reflecting the investment made in plowing, manure, and seeds, applied or sown on the first fields in the crop rotation. Performance analysis is thus refocused on inputs rather than on outputs. We do not argue that these yields were systematically better than those of large farms. Rather, we point out through this econometric modeling the fact that in the Vexin area, small farms at least invested very heavily in winter wheat without registering any falls in economies of scale.
Réseaux sociaux