Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

206V. I. LENINFrom these figures we see first of all how great is theconcentration of livestock farming as a whole in Denmark.Big capitalist farmers owning over 40 hectares of land constituteonly one-tenth of the total number of farmers (10.7per cent); but they concentrate in their hands more thanthree-fifths of all the land (62.6 per cent) and nearly halfof all the livestock: 45.6 per cent of all the horses, 48.4per cent of all the cattle, 32.7 per cent of all the sheep, and44.6 per cent of all the pigs.If to these capitalist farmers we add the well-to-do peasants,i.e., those owning from 10 to 40 hectares, we shallget a little over a quarter of the total number of farmers(27.0 per cent) who concentrate in their hands nine-tenthsof all the land, three-fourths of all the horses, four-fifthsof all the cattle, seven-tenths of all the pigs, and nearlyhalf of all the poultry. The great bulk of the “farmers”,nearly three-fourths (73 per cent), own less than 10 hectaresof land each and, on the whole, represent the proletarianisedand semi-proletarianised mass, which plays an insignificantpart in the sum total of the country’s agriculturaland livestock economy.As far as the distribution of the various types of animalsis concerned, sheep and pig breeding deserve specialattention. The first is a declining branch of livestock farming,unprofitable for the majority of European countriesat the present time owing to market conditions and overseascompetition. The state of the international marketcalls for other forms of livestock farming to take the placeof sheep farming. On the other hand, pig breeding is aparticularly profitable and rapidly developing branch oflivestock farming for meat in Europe. Statisticsshow that sheep farming is also declining in Denmark,whereas pig breeding is increasing very rapidly. From1861 to 1898, the number of sheep in Denmark droppedfrom 1,700,000 to 1,100,000. The number of cattle increasedfrom 1,100,000 to 1,700,000. The number of pigs increasedfrom 300,000 to 1,200,000, i.e., almost a fourfoldincrease.Comparing the distribution of sheep and pigs among thesmall and big farms we thus clearly see in the former themaximum of routine, the least adaptability to the require-