Page 158 - Mocarelli, Luca, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2020. Maize to the People! Cultivation, Consumption and Trade in the North-Eastern Mediterranean (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Century). Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 158
maize to the people!
Graph 15. Field crops and arable land in western Slovenia in 1929 (in %)
Source: Gospodarska 1970, 269.
fields and the plates. On the other hand, the share of maize kept increas-
ing. Buckwheat was therefore “collateral damage” of the altered macroeco-
nomic environment in the new Yugoslav state. As the relative prices of ag-
ricultural products in comparison with industrial ones changed, peasants
would more quickly abandon the poor-yielding crops, which buckwheat
definitely was. Its yield per hectare was by far the lowest of all the cereals
(Graph 14). Even millet had a better yield, and it nevertheless gradually dis-
appeared from the fields. Growing buckwheat was completely irrational,
as it called for too much time and labour. The peasants’ “emotional attach-
ment” to buckwheat, which had been so characteristic for the Slovenian cir-
cumstances a century earlier, succumbed to the efforts to ensure a rational
economization of agricultural work. On the other hand, the value of wheat,
maize, and potatoes was preserved or even increased in the new Yugoslav
environment. It is understandable that fields where these crops were grown
kept expanding during the two decades before World War II.
The western parts of Slovenia were exposed to similar processes. In the
interwar period, these parts – approximately one third of today’s Slovenian
territory – were a part of the Italian state. There, maize had already tradi-
tionally been a dominant crop as well as a staple food of the people. In spite
of the two economic contexts – the Yugoslav and the Italian one – the forc-
156
Graph 15. Field crops and arable land in western Slovenia in 1929 (in %)
Source: Gospodarska 1970, 269.
fields and the plates. On the other hand, the share of maize kept increas-
ing. Buckwheat was therefore “collateral damage” of the altered macroeco-
nomic environment in the new Yugoslav state. As the relative prices of ag-
ricultural products in comparison with industrial ones changed, peasants
would more quickly abandon the poor-yielding crops, which buckwheat
definitely was. Its yield per hectare was by far the lowest of all the cereals
(Graph 14). Even millet had a better yield, and it nevertheless gradually dis-
appeared from the fields. Growing buckwheat was completely irrational,
as it called for too much time and labour. The peasants’ “emotional attach-
ment” to buckwheat, which had been so characteristic for the Slovenian cir-
cumstances a century earlier, succumbed to the efforts to ensure a rational
economization of agricultural work. On the other hand, the value of wheat,
maize, and potatoes was preserved or even increased in the new Yugoslav
environment. It is understandable that fields where these crops were grown
kept expanding during the two decades before World War II.
The western parts of Slovenia were exposed to similar processes. In the
interwar period, these parts – approximately one third of today’s Slovenian
territory – were a part of the Italian state. There, maize had already tradi-
tionally been a dominant crop as well as a staple food of the people. In spite
of the two economic contexts – the Yugoslav and the Italian one – the forc-
156
