Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

Italy’s soil faltered. Mussolini’s Fascist government spent about half a billion
dollars on soil conservation in the 1930s.
Because Rome imported most of its grain from North Africa, Egypt, and
the Middle East, it made fewer demands on the soils of the Po Valley, Gaul
(France), Britain, and the Germanic provinces. Roman agriculture in its
western European provinces was mostly confined to river valleys; for the
most part hillslopes that had been farmed in the Bronze Age remained
forested until medieval times. It is no coincidence that these northern
provinces fed the western European civilization that centuries later rose
from the ruins of the Roman Empire.
After the empire collapsed, many Roman fields north and west of the
Alps reverted to forest or grass. In the eleventh century, farmers worked less
than a fifth of England. With half in pasture and half in crops left fallow
every other year, this meant that only about 5 percent of the land was
plowed each year. Less than 10 percent of Germany, Holland, and Belgium
were plowed annually in the Middle Ages. Even in the most densely populated
parts of southern France, no more than 15 percent of the land was
cultivated each year.
In early medieval times, townships controlled a given area of land held
in common by all villagers. Each household received a share of land to cultivate
each season, after which the fields reverted to communal use. The
general rule was to plant a crop of wheat, followed by beans and then a fallow
season. After the harvest, cattle wandered the fields turning crop stubble
into meat, milk, and manure.
Columbia University professor Vladimir Simkhovitch saw the structure
of medieval village communities as an adaptation to farming degraded
soils. He noted that a similar pattern of land use and ownership characterized
many old villages throughout Europe where the land holdings of individual
peasants had not been fenced off and enclosed. Barns, stables, and
vegetable gardens were always near homesteads, but fields were divided
into a patchwork of land belonging to individual farmers. Each farmer
might own ten or more parts of three different fields managed collectively
for a crop of wheat or rye, then oats, barley, or beans, and finally fallow
pasture.
Simkhovitch argued that an inconvenient arrangement in which a
farmer had no say in the rotation or type of tillage used on his fields—
which could be quite distant from each other—must have been adopted
throughout the continent for good reason. He doubted that such arrangements
were simply inherited from Roman villas or imposed under feudal-
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