Main Ideas and Methods of Social Agronomy

Given the specific peasant thinking, such a course should begin with accounting tasks for the listeners, which would help them learn basic concepts of the agricultural economy. After the listeners have learned the organizational foundations of their economies and the most important concepts of the agricultural economy, the lecturer should present a critical assessment of the current agricultural situation and identify the economic significance of the zemstvo agronomic reform.

A suggested program for a course on organizing the peasant economy can be as follows:

1. Family composition and its consumer budget (in kind and cash).

2. What products and how much of them should be produced for the peasant family in kind?

3. Analysis of the organization of field cultivation. Farming systems, crop rotation, and various methods for restoring soil fertility.

4. Analysis of the organization of cattle-breeding.

5. Analysis of the organization of fertilization. Fertilizing methods and norms.

6. Analysis of the organization of productive cattle-breeding. Possible types of cattle-breeding.

7. Organization of fodder production. Criticism of the existing system. Methods for calculating feed reserves.

8. Analysis of organization and methods of accounting for dead stock. The concept of depreciation. The value of machinery in agriculture. The advantages of small and large economies. The importance of cooperation for smallholders.

9. Analysis of organization and methods of accounting for outbuildings. Long-term loans, fixed capital, and short-term loans. Productive and non-productive loans.

10. Calculating the cost value of a horse's working day. Estimates of manure and other nonmarket products.

11. Accounting for field cultivation. Profitability of crops. The cost value of one's working day. The price of a pood of grain. Organization of sales. Market doctrine and pricing.

12. Accounting for the meadow, garden, and so on.

13. Accounting for productive livestock -- an assessment of straw, payment for fodder in kind. Principles of livestock selection. Unions in cattle-breeding.

14. Consolidated balance of the economy. General organization of labor and monetary budget. Machinery. Short-term loans. Calculations of profitability per desiatina. The concept of rent and the origin of land prices.

Our peasants rarely keep economic records, and in most cases, the available peasant account books have only records of cash receipts and payments, which dos not allow the evaluation of the profitability of the economy. We know the very sad experience of the more cultured Western-European peasantry and have little hope that in the near future peasant bookkeeping will become mass in Russia. However, exact numbers describing the elements of the organizational plan of the peasant economy are so important for both the agronomist and the peasant reforming his economy that the organization of peasant bookkeeping and scientific analysis of its data are the key tasks of social agronomy.

Besides bookkeeping for the entire, economic turnover, there are much more successful attempts at accurate accounting for separate economic transactions, especially if accounting is of particular importance for them. For instance, the so-called “control partnerships” aim to calculate the cost of milk, the cost of a pood of feed in milk, and of other organizational elements in dairy husbandry. Peasant economies unite as a control partnership and invite a “control assistant” who collects weekly data on the composition and amount of feed per cow, теорияmilk yields, and fat content. Then the control assistant calculates the cost value of a bucket of milk and a pood of fat and also the share of a pood of feed in the price of milk, which allows peasants, on the one hand, to get rid of bad cows with a high share of feed in the price of milk. On the other hand, it allows them to introduce the most profitable and rational feed rations. The well-known Danish feed standards are based on the mass data of Danish control partnerships.

The organization of peasant bookkeeping is accompanied by another method of the organizational work with completely different tasks. Contests of economies are very common in Western Europe and quite regular in the south of Russia. The winner is awarded an honorary challenge cup, an honorary diploma, some valuable or household item, and sometimes a sum of money.

The competing farms are periodically inspected by a special commission -- the jury -- to be described in detail for further accounting. They maintain detailed bookkeeping and are compared at the end of the financial year. The evaluation criteria depend on the goals set by the contest organizers. Sometimes the jury considers technical advantages, sometimes the gross yield per desiatina, or the price of a unit of labor and capital invested. In most cases, the jury's decision is based not on the objective indicators but on the general subjective impression of how the competing economies “made use of the labor forces and material means of production.” At the same time, such contests provide considerable accounting data.

The main goals of the economies' contests are as follows: 1) to revitalize the creative initiative of participants, to expand their organizational experience by comparing their economy with other competing economies and by communicating with the jury members; 2) to point the rural population's attention to organizational issues and to use the results of such contests for pedagogical purposes; 3) to use the competing economies as model economies. In the following chapters, we will consider in detail the importance of model economies in social agronomy, which still have a very modest place among other methods of its work.

Thus, we considered those sections of the organizational work of the social agronomist, in which he observes, keeps account, and analyzes the organization of peasant economies and uses these data to develop a system of agronomic activities and for pedagogical purposes.

In what cases does the social agronomist become a direct organizer of economic activity? As we have already mentioned, the organization and management of individual peasant economies diffuses the agronomist's efforts and cannot have a mass effect. However, there are some cases in which the direct organizational work of the social agronomist is not a waste of effort and is of great mass importance. These include: 1) the organization of auxiliary social-agronomic in stitutions -- rental points, grain-cleaning stations, breeding-coupling stations, experimental plots, agricultural warehouses, etc.; 2) organizational assistance to public and cooperative economies and undertakings, e.g., the organization of a dairy farm, a calf-breeding station, a cooperative seed farming; organization of the intermediary operations of local cooperatives in the sales of flax, eggs, etc.; organization of land improvement and public land management (like other organizational work, they can be done by specialized staff, but, as a part of the social-agronomic work, they should be directed by the local agronomist in full accordance with other aspects of agronomic work, especially under the reform of land relations, such as getting rid of strip farming, straightening and rounding of plot borders, etc.); 3) the most controversial and difficult type of social-agronomic work -- the organization of model or experimental economies, in which the social agronomist aims not to increase the wealth of the individual peasant economy but to use it as a means of agronomic work and a kind of visual aid in agronomic propaganda.

Supporters of the third type of the social-agronomic work believe that the model and experimental economies scattered in the very thickness of the peasantry should be a living example that puts all their neighbors on the path of agronomic progress. There was a time when model economies were very popular, received a lot of funding, were generously subsidized, supplied with implements, and provided with soft loans and other benefits. Such enhanced support put model economies in an exceptional position and deprived their success of any significance from an organizational perspective. Moreover, attempts to organize model economies without such support and only with advisory assistance were not successful. Given the passivity of our population, they attracted very few visitors and, given the limited number of such economies, they had no mass impact.

For these purposes, the economies' contests are much more effective: they require fewer efforts from social agronomy, but, due to the large number of participants and public attention, they have a greater social impact. The demonstration fields, experiments, and sowing, which many peasant economies introduced to show different techniques for a small payments, were even more successful and ensured both mass scale and mass impact. However, demonstration events have nothing to do with the organization of economies. The organization of individual economies is not of great demonstration importance but is very useful as an experimental event.

Even if the program of social agronomy is based on a detailed, organizational analysis of the existing and emerging economic systems, in the organizational perspective it still has an abstract character. Therefore, it is extremely important to make its economic ideal more specific to assess its economic realizability and possible practical forms. Such a practical specification of the theoretical economic ideal enriches the agricultural experience of the agronomist and makes him revise the program more than once to eliminate elements that are difficult to implement and to add elements revealed during the prac- teopma tical organizational work.

Thus, to lead the peasant economy to a new economic ideal, the agronomist should know the degree and forms of this ideal realizability. And just as there is usually not an experiment or model near the agronomic station but rather a test plot for sowing new crops and testing a new plow or sowing machine, there is always a neighbor or a whole village to willingly become involved in all economic undertakings, even if unpredictable in terms of success. In the agronomic progress perspective, this test economy or village is many years ahead of the whole district, because it develops specific forms of the new economic structure and serves as the best school for social agronomy. We use the word “school” because the agronomist has teachers. His theoretical knowledge and skills of cultural management are supplemented by the peasant's practical norms and centuries-old skills. Only their synthesis can create a sustainable form of the peasant, progressive economy.

Chapter ±±. Social agronomy and cooperation

In social agronomy, there is no more important, difficult, and even painful task than “to organize the local population in unions and groups that, on the one hand, would use cooperation to provide the small economy with all the advantages of the large one; and, on the other hand, would take on consolidation and strengthening of the new economic principles.” It goes without saying that the cooperative movement is of great economic importance, and that the contemporary progressive peasant economy is unthinkable without cooperative associations just as modern industry is unthinkable without capitalist forms. Moreover, cooperation is essentially important for the social development of the village.

Not so long ago, centuries-old silence reigned on our rural plains, while metropolises lived an interesting and intensive cultural life full of developing and failing systems of social reforms and stubborn struggles of various directions in the name and on behalf of the broad masses of the Russian plain. However, this life rarely affected the peasant masses, who had no voice, no creative will, and no social thought because they were scattered. The Russian people was only a demos, a backwoods mass, but it had to be a democracy, a self-aware people. The Russian people could not turn from a demos into a democracy because of a lack of organization, social skills, and organized social thought.

These basic elements of the democratic culture cannot be created by binding decrees or appear all of a sudden from nowhere. This culture is based on the long and invisible work of social forces, on the unnoticeable but deep rebirth of the nation. The Russian Revolution revealed this truth with amazing clarity and showed that we still do not have a nation and that even the decree of the Constituent Assembly cannot turn the Russian demos into a democracy.

However, the researchers of Russian life discovered in the Russian village the smallest processes preparing a future democracy, and the most important such process is rural cooperation. The everyday routine work of boards, supervisory councils, and general meetings, union building, and endless debates about building a mill or selling flax created new people who would take on responsibility for the future of our country. This social meaning of cooperation is especially important for social agronomy.

We constantly emphasize that agronomic work can be successful only on the basis of people's initiative, and cooperation is such an initiative in the most organized forms. Cooperatives are centers of social relations, and, by influencing them, we can affect very broad masses. By focusing our agronomic propaganda on cooperative groups consisting of the most active and conscious rural strata, we reinforce our propaganda by the authority of the cooperative initiative. Because our propaganda affects the conscious cooperative circles that provide it with conscious support of the living word, personal examples and material assistance, our agronomic influence becomes exceptionally massive and powerful. Therefore, it is true that cooperatives are a resonator of agronomic propaganda.

Agronomic lectures at the general meetings of cooperatives, the distribution of agricultural literature through cooperatives, the organization of cooperative libraries, experimental fields, breeding-coupling and grain-cleaning cooperative stations, the cooperative purchase of seeds, implements, and fertilizers, loans for agricultural improvements, the pedagogical significance of the cooperative sorting out the joint sales of flax, eggs and milk, etc. -- all of this is an invaluable help of local cooperatives to social agronomy. Without cooperatives the social agronomist can establish no organized ties with the population, without which his voice would be lonely and lost among thousands of economies. That is why almost everywhere agronomists start their work by promoting and directing the cooperative movement.

However, exaggerated forms of this work are harmful for both social agronomy and cooperation. Some agronomists develop a whole network of cooperative institutions in a region that has no prerequisites for cooperation. Thus, they acquire cooperation without cooperators, i.e., agronomists are forced to manage cooperatives almost single-handedly. By neglecting the self-sufficiency of the cooperative movement, they tend to consider cooperatives as a tool and means of agronomic assistance similar to warehouses, breeding-coupling stations, and other institutions of social agronomy. Other agronomists, in contrast, forget about their zemstvo service and become figures of the cooperative movement, members of cooperative boards and other cooperative bodies, and often differ from other cooperative members only by sources of income.

Certainly, both extremes are pathological and often lead to painful conflicts under the development and strengthening of the cooperative movement. The lack of a proper fundamental demarcation between the tasks of cooperatives and self-government bodies has repeatedly led to struggles, especially in the field of cultural-educational and commercial-intermediary work. Previously, many such conflicts were determined by the distrust of democratic cooperation with the qualified zemstvo'. Today, after the Revolution and the introduction of the volost zemstvo, the task of the proper demarcation between these two democratic institutions in agronomy and other areas of the local work causes us to consider this issue in more detail.

Unfortunately, this general issue was rarely considered in our cooperative and agricultural press, and its solutions were often absurd. For instance, I have met some ardent cooperators who believed that the broad development of the cooperative movement would eventually abolish all zemstvo institutions. At the same time, until very recently, many members of the zemstvo believed that the development of small zemstvo units would eliminate the need to organize cooperatives.

It is obvious that both positions are wrong. There is a fundamental distinction between the work of zemstvos and the work of cooperatives determined by the nature of these institutions in economic life. Thus, under both -- the developed, small zemstvo unit and the ideally developed and strengthened cooperative movement -- zemstvos and cooperation would continue to exist. The question is how to prevent their competition in economic life and rationally separate them on the basis of their essential features.

Zemstvo is a forced union of all people living in the area; any assistance to the zemstvo in its economic activities consists of events and measures that would be beneficial not to Peter, Sidor, Ivan or Fedor, but to the entire population included in this forced union. Such assistance is possible only when the zemstvo improves and organizes, not its economic activity but its conditions. If the economic conditions are improved, every economic agent will feel the beneficial influence of the zemstvo work proportional to his economic activity. Therefore, the zemstvo aims to improve roads, organize local trade, develop public medical and veterinary care, a public network of school, out-of-school and vocational education, organize local mail, telephone communication and small credit offices that open the way for the wide financial market, etc. All these zemstvo activities are necessary conditions for the development of the local, national economy.

Cooperation is a combination of some aspects of economic activity. In its organizational plan, the small economy identifies those economic processes, in which a large economy has undoubted advantages over a small one, and unites with other interested economies into a cooperative to achieve the economic scale of the large economy. The cooperative combines credit, sales, and purchase; processes potatoes, flax, vegetables, milk, resin, etc.; sorts flax, breeds pedigree cattle -- in other words, rationalizes all economic activities.

Thus, although the zemstvo's task is to create the best conditions for economic life, the cooperative's task is the best organization of economic activity. This is a schematic distinction of the economic tasks that is not always achievable. First, all economic enterprises including cooperatives are one of the conditions of economic life for all other enterprises. However, they are a condition by the very fact of their existence, but they do not set a task “to be a condition” and do not work according to this task. On the contrary, many zemstvo activities -- road construction, insurance, agricultural warehousing, small crediting -- are conditions of the economic activities of all economies in the zemstvo area and grand economic projects. Such projects aim not to ensure the greatest profit on the capital invested but rather to create the best conditions for individual economies in the area served by the zemstvo. Profitability of the new roadway or zemstvo insurance system is measured not by income (fares or insurance premiums) but by the growth of the general regional welfare determined by the use of the roadway or insurance system as conditions of economic activity.

This is the difference in incomes from organizing an economic activity in cooperative form or in the form of the zemstvo institution. Cooperation provides the population with incomes from those economic operations that are combined in the cooperative. Zemstvo economic undertakings, however, often bring greater incomes due not to a zemstvo enterprise turnover but to an increase in profitability in various branches of individual economies, which is determined by the conditions created by the zemstvo institution. For instance, the roadway increases incomes not by collecting fares but by saving transportation costs.

Certainly, the zemstvo often takes on cooperative functions, especially if cooperation is not developed, and vice versa -- the cooperative aims to improve general economic conditions. However, the identified fundamental distinction allows an understanding of the complicated circumstances and helps answer the question of whether the agronomist should work in cooperatives.

We have already mentioned that cooperation is an economic action, because cooperatives are an essential condition of economic life. Without cooperatives, all agronomists' educational activities will be reduced to nothing. To buy the promoted implements and seeds, the peasant needs credit; to use the feed reserves of the introduced grass sowing project, the peasant needs industrial dairy farming, which is unthinkable without cooperation. That is why, if the zemstvo does not want to reduce its educational work to nothing, it should strive to create this necessary “condition” by promoting the cooperative idea and organizing a network of cooperatives, which is absolutely essential for the successful educational work of the agronomist. теорияThis is not the only task of zemstvo cooperative work. A network of cooperatives can become the best economic condition, only under normal and flawless cooperative work. Therefore, if cooperation is not developed, the zemstvo should support it with the advice and instructions of the agronomist or special instructor. The zemstvo should also provide good credit terms for young organizations. However, neither the zemstvo nor zemstvo agronomists should do the cooperative work; the agronomist cannot and should not replace the cooperator, board member, or accountant. Such a replacement would make the agronomist's work economic, which contradicts the basic tasks of the zemstvo. If the cooperative does not have members capable of bookkeeping and organizational work, the zemstvo should teach them the cooperative work by organizing special cooperative bookkeeping courses or by instructing. But, in no case should the zemstvo make its representative a cooperator, because this contradicts both cooperative and zemstvo principles.

Chapter ±2. The equipment of the agronomic station

Almost every aspect of social-agronomic activities needs specific implements. Successful, and at the same time economical, equipment for social-agronomic work is a difficult task. Often the success or failure of social-agronomic work depends to a large extent on its material means. It goes without saying that the main condition of success is the agronomic staff, and, if it is poorly trained, then no implements will help. However, a good agronomist without good implements could do little, and most of his efforts would be wasted. When following the path of social agronomy and spending large funds to invite agronomists, self-governing bodies, cooperatives, and other public organizations should recognize that the success of their work requires no less funding for material means.

The issue of the composition of these means is poorly developed theoretically and, by its very nature, does not allow the provision of recipes. Moreover, social-agronomic work varies at its different stages. Its content changes and differs at the initial propaganda stage; after several years, at the stage of intensification in relation to the cooperative movement; and a few years later, at the stage of deep differentiation and functional specialization of the social-agronomic staff.

The differences in social-agronomic work are also determined by the economic, natural, and everyday features of its area. Thus, the implements of social agronomy in the Champagne vineyards and on the slopes of Vesuvius would differ from the implements of the zemstvo agronomic area in the Vologda Province or Western Siberia. However, the same general idea would determine the selection of implements for any agronomic area regardless of its longitude and latitude. Every material means of social-agronomic work should correspond to its nature, its content, and the specific local economic conditions.

That is why it is impossible to write any recipes for equipping an agronomic station or the wholesale production of implements. Commercial companies easily equip beet-sugar and other factories or select items for equipping chemical laboratories, because they know that all those processes are the same for all these factories and laboratories wherever they are located. The peculiarity and variety of agronomic work exclude such a possibility. Even if there were a possibility for the wholesale equipment of an agronomic station, a large share of funds would be spent in vain, because the agronomist would never use many of the implements and would suffer from the lack of many others.

It is unacceptable to equip an agronomic station before or at the very beginning of its work. Nobody knows in advance the content of local agronomic work. Therefore, every implement should be purchased at the very moment it is needed, so that it will be used on the next day of purchase. Thus, equipment for an agronomic station should be determined by social-agronomic work. The collection of implements is never complete, because the social-agronomic work never stops at one stage but always develops and updates its content.

Although we cannot give any general recipes, we should identify those basic principles that social agronomy worked out for the agronomist. The first step in equipping an agronomic station is to choose its location. It should be an economically and historically homogeneous area that usually consists of individual economies that concentrate around one market center. The system of the village market is an economically and socially isolated group of villages whose borders often do not coincide with the administrative regions. In most cases, the personal ties and economic and social relations of the population are limited to this little world, and our economic plans should consider it an indivisible national-economic unit. Our agronomic station should be located in the natural center of this little world near the market that every peasant would certainly visit several times a year.

Having chosen the location of the agronomic station, we have to answer the question of the facilities that are necessary for social-agronomic work, which actually consists of two questions: 1) an apartment for the agronomist and his family; 2) facilities for the social-agronomic work. The first question is beyond the scope of our book; we merely emphasize the necessity of its satisfactory solution. The necessary conditions for the successful work of the local agronomist are the guaranteed minimum conditions of everyday life. In our Russian village, it is almost impossible to find a suitable apartment for rent, so we often have to build a house for the agronomist and his family. Ufortunately, this seemingly insignificant question sometimes becomes extremely pressing, and we know many cases in which the agronomist left his station because of the unbearable living conditions. теорияThe facilities for social-agronomic work consist of a reception room, an agronomist's office, an agricultural museum, and auxiliary outbuildings such as rental, breeding, and grain-cleaning stations. Finally, rooms are needed for lectures and exhibitions, which are important not only for social agronomy but also for out-of-school education, cooperatives, and other sectors of the local public work. For reasons of economy and convenience, they cooperate to develop a network of lecture and theater facilities in people's houses and schools and also to build special halls if there are no suitable facilities. When developing this network, it is necessary to identify the social-agronomic area as an optimal radius from the market center. Buildings that constitute the agronomic station should ideally form an estate near the market square as the center of local life.

For the agronomist, the issue of moving around the agronomic area is no less pressing than the issue of an apartment and facilities. Unlike the medical work station, by nature, agronomic work is mainly traveling, especially in its first years,. The social significance of the agronomist deprived of the ability to travel around his area is close to zero. Therefore, organizers of social agronomy have to guarantee their employees the complete independence of travelling. Cutting travel expenses brings all agronomists' work to nothing. Total travel expenses are usually so high that it is better to purchase a means of transportation.

Besides an apartment, facilities, and travelling, the agronomist needs some items for research and organizational work. One of the previous chapters, which described methods for developing an agronomic program, allows one to imagine the whole set of items necessary for the agronomist in his office. Its central part is the library with the most important books on natural sciences, agriculture, agricultural economy, law, all kinds of reference books, major agronomic and cooperative journals. The library should pay special attention to all kinds of materials concerning the area of the agronomist's activity. Historical and ethnographic studies of the province, works of geological, botanical, soil, entomological, and other expeditions in the agronomic area and surrounding regions, works of the nearby experimental institutions, descriptions of individual economies and areas of the region, reports of all local institutions, collections of statistical information on the agronomic area, albums of newspaper and magazine cuttings that describe local life -- these are sources absolutely necessary for the library of the local agronomist.

In addition to the library, the agronomist's office should have devices and tools necessary for research. These include instruments for soil and seed analysis, chemical reagents, barometer, scales, a plant press, geodesic measuring tools, and all sorts of other items necessary for agronomic work according to the local conditions and the stage of social-agronomic development.

Finally, the third group of items in the agronomist's office consists of the research results of the agronomic staff. It is a kind of a museum of the surrounding area and holds herbariums of local flora, collections of weeds, cultivated plants, pests, soil monoliths, examples of soil, results of seed and other types of analysis, results of experiments of the agronomist, neighboring experimental fields and local collective experiments. There are also graphs and cartograms of the main economic elements of the region, which also reflect social-agronomic work.

The agronomist's office is not limited to the indoor premises and includes some meteorological instruments necessary for simple observations and a small plot for test planting and testing new machines, etc.

In addition to implements to serve the agronomist as a researcher, the agronomic station should be equipped with some aids necessary for the agronomist as a propagandist and lecturer. We have already described such visual aids, so let us make a few comments. First, the agronomic station should have lecture equipment -- a projection lamp and cinematograph, collections of slides and tapes, lecture tables, pictures, and posters, a portable blackboard, tools for presenting physical, chemical, and physiological experiments, implements for the simplest analysis, models of flowers, grain ears, livestock, and so on. It should have all sorts of items for conversations and practical demonstrations, a portable set of butter-making machines, models of agricultural machines, and implements promoted by the agronomist; wall posters, leaflets, and brochures to be distributed or sold to listeners after lectures. Sometimes these items are combined into special collections to decorate the agronomist's reception room or to serve as a portable lecture set or a special, mobile, agricultural exhibition. Some agronomists designed special mobile vans for agricultural exhibitions, but this form of visual aid has not become widespread.

It is necessary to emphasize that the visual aids should correspond to the tasks and needs of the local, social-agronomic work and, if possible, be based on the local material. This rule, recognized by all practitioners, is the reason the local workers are disappointed by visual aids bought in the market that sells wholesale goods and cannot offer visual aids that reflect the local regional features. Therefore, a significant part of posters and tables is made by local agronomic workers.

To conclude our brief description of the agronomic station equipment, it is necessary to mention a regional network of small libraries of popular and reference literature on the agricultural issues, which should be organized on the basis of small agricultural societies, cooperatives, and people's houses. Agronomic libraries are closely related to the organization of library services in the village in general. Therefore, the network of agronomic libraries should be developed by agronomists in cooperation with the figures of out-of-school education.

The agronomic station often includes grain-cleaning stations, rental points, breeding-coupling stations, and agricultural warehouses. We have already discussed the organization of these in the previous chapters.

Thus, social-agronomic work requires diverse and numerous equipment and, thus, considerable funding. At the beginning of the chapter we mentioned that these costs are inevitable. In many cases, the needs would certainly exceed the financial opportunities, which would reduce the agronomic budget. It would make the agronomist choose between its positions and compare agronomic expenses with other branches of the economy. It is impossible to give recipes or general rules for such reductions, because it depends on the case and local conditions. However, it is better not to begin social-agronomic work at all if there is no way to provide the invited agronomic staff with all necessary material means.

Chapter ±3. Registration and evaluation of social-agronomic work

We have described all basic forms of social-agronomic work and can finally proceed to its economic and social results. Unfortunately, the methodology for evaluating social-agronomic work and its results has not yet been developed. If we consider hundreds of reports of numerous social-agronomic organizations to find out the methods their authors used to evaluate their work, we would discover very diverse methods and measures of success. Some authors measure the success of social-agronomic work by the development of a regional agronomic network, by the number of rental points, breeding and grain-cleaning stations, or simply by an increase in the zemstvo funding of social agronomy. Other authors rely on the number of the agronomist's visits to the area and the number of conversations and lectures given. Still other authors mention the attendance of agronomic interviews, customer expansion of rental points and other stations and an increase in the demand for agronomic consulting. Some American reports compare the costs of agronomic measures with an increase in the profitability of the regional economy due to the growth in yields determined by the promoted improvements.

All methods of evaluation have different tasks and are based on different indicators. By comparing them we can distinguish four objects of evaluation: 1) scientific research of social agronomy that allows the identification of the local agricultural needs and development of a program of social-agronomic work; 2) activities of social agronomy, agronomic bodies, personnel and auxiliary institutions; 3) the social effect of these activities -- the number of heads of peasant economies affected by social agronomy, their impression of agronomic propaganda, their economic activity, and the social ties between the population and bodies of social agronomy; 4) the economic consequences of the population's response to agronomic propaganda. Thus, we have to consider, on the one hand, the organizational and technological changes that the local population makes in their economies under the influence of agronomic propaganda; on the other hand, the economic results of innovations.

According to these four objects of evaluation, agronomic reports should have the same theoretical structure as academic research reports. However, the authors of agronomic reports usually do not analyze their work and its results and merely present short protocols of their actions. Such a limitation of the tasks of the agronomic report is extremely harmful. Without the agronomist's careful analysis of his observations, activities, and their results, social agronomy would work blindly, its success would be accidental, and its failures incomprehensible and inexplicable.

When the agronomist is overloaded with all kinds of urgent work, writing a report is often his only time for undisturbed reflection on his activities and his only opportunity to break loose from the everyday agronomic routine, to look at himself and his work from the outside, and to see a general picture and compare tasks and achievements. Thus, the agronomic report is of great importance as a collection of indicators for evaluating the whole social-agronomic work.

It might seem that we contradict ourselves and set tasks for the local workers that obviously exceed their means. Often a great agricultural practitioner, who is very skillful and has a deserved, huge impact on the local population, has neither sufficient literary talent nor interest in paperwork. In other words, he is not able to write even a satisfactory protocol report. We understand this and set the task not for individual agronomic workers but for the agronomic organization as a single collective will that organizes and directs the activities of individual workers. Moreover, our requirements are for uyezd and mainly provincial reports, whereas reports of local workers must follow the same principles but can be limited to a good protocol as a source material for the report of the whole agronomic organization.

Concerning the methodology of social-agronomic work, its results, and reports, let us consider first the tasks of the local agronomist and then the general report of the whole organization.

Every description should begin with an accurate registration of the phenomenon. Some agronomic institutions -- warehouses of agricultural implements and machinery, breeding-coupling, rental and grain-cleaning stations -- have their own accounts, but the agronomist needs a diary or relies on his memory for other branches of work. Using only memory to register numerous phenomena is an unreliable path, especially in social agronomy, because our agronomists often change their locations. Because of this staff turnover, the whole work experience and knowledge of local features, sometimes very extensive, leave the agronomic station together with the agronomist, and his successor has to start all over again. He often repeats the mistakes of his predecessor and spends great efforts to collect information that was already collected. That is why social-agronomic activities and all agronomist's observations should be registered in detail and, if possible, written every day.

теорияBesides the most accurate protocol of all social-agronomic actions, the diary should include all the agronomist's observations of the local agricultural and everyday life, his thoughts, considerations, the results of the analysis, and other facts of agronomic life. This can be a simple diary or records can be analyzed, for instance, grouped into categories. The latter allows some further analysis, for example, making a cartogram of the current agronomic work by putting on a big schematic map of the agronomic area the numbers indicating agronomic measures near the names of villages in which such measures were taken. Some agronomists even have a “file” for each village -- a kind of a current report on the work in the village.

A diary and simple methods of its analysis constitute the basis of the local agronomist's report. If he wants to make an independent, detailed report, he relies on his registered observations, memory, statistical, and other local data to proceed to the monographic description of his social-agronomic work. If, for some reason, the local agronomist cannot make a detailed report, he can write a brief protocol, which is necessary for uyezd and provincial reports.

For the general report of the agronomic organization, the reports and protocols of local agronomists are used as source material; the main requirement is their comparability. As a rule, agronomic organizations design special questionnaires for making protocols. They are necessary even for agronomists who prepared their detailed reports, because, despite their advantages in terms of content and structure, often such reports are so different from the general questionnaire that they cannot be compared. One such questionnaire was developed by the Moscow provincial zemstvo agronomic organization. The Moscow questionnaire-report is somewhat cumbersome, but many of its questions are general and do not need to be asked annually. In other words, such questionnaire-reports can be (1) annual reports in the form of a protocol and (2) more complex and complete reports prepared periodically, for instance, every five years.

Questionnaire-reports, individual reports of local agronomists, reports of experimental fields and other auxiliary agronomic organizations, statistical, meteorological and other data serve as source material for the general report of a social-agronomic organization. This general report should be based on the analysis of all four sections mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. It should present the research work of the agronomist, explain tasks of the agronomic organization, describe in detail and critically analyze actions of the agronomic organization for achieving the goals of its program and, finally, carefully assess the social and economic consequences of the social-agronomic work.

A critical analysis of all four sections serves as a starting point for revising the program and developing directions for future work, which can form a special part of the report. However, these four sections do not represent a plan of the report -- they are only four elements that should be taken into account in any report plan. There is still no form for the general agronomic report, and its development is certainly a matter of practice rather than of theoretical analysis. Therefore, the general report should differ significantly from the agronomist's report by describing the work of many dozens of agronomic workers, by interpreting mass material, and by appropriate techniques, including those of comparison.

The dependence of the agronomic program and the work of agronomists on the duration of the social-agronomic work in the area, the dependence of the agronomic service on the villages' distance from the agronomist's house, a comparison of agronomic programs with the organizational plans of the peasant economies, the dependence of the peasant responsiveness on literacy, prosperity, and commercialization, a critical comparison of the success of various branches of agronomic propaganda, the mass economic effects of social-agronomic work, etc. -- they all should be measured in the report with special coefficients and methods for assessing the intensity of agronomic work, its susceptibility, and social and economic success.

The most difficult part of this undeveloped method for assessing social-agronomic work is the evaluation of the economic effect. For instance, if yields grow in some province, pig-breeding develops, and the export of agricultural products abroad increases rapidly, how is this agricultural progress related to the local social-agronomic work and to what extent can social agronomy regard an increase in national income as its own merit? How many rubles did the national economy receive per each ruble spent on social agronomy? Perhaps the development of the Volokolamsk grass-sowing or Kherson black- earth fallow farming would be just as cooperative and fast without any agronomic work. Perhaps social agronomy provided only a few thousand out of a million rubles increase in the value of the Poltava crop, when only seven kopecks per each ruble were spent on it. How to answer all these questions? Where to find the necessary evaluation criteria?

The increasing profitability of agriculture is an extremely complex phenomenon determined by a huge number of reasons, and social agronomy is only one of them. It is almost impossible to distinguish its separate effect in the general result. Moreover, social agronomy aims not to create new forms of production but to accelerate the economic evolution and introduce a new economic system earlier than it would develop without the social-agronomic influence. Such an impact of the social-agronomic work complicates its accurate evaluation even more.

American agronomists tried to compare the costs of experimental fields with their benefits for the national economy. They decided to consider one of their most sustainable and obvious agronomic achievements (a new, selected variety of corn, a special technique of plowing the fallow or a combination of fertilizers), they calculat- teopma ed the effect of this innovation compared to the old methods in dollars per hectare, and multiplied it by the number of hectares on which the innovation was applied. This is a very rough approach, but it is quite illustrative.

Certainly, there are more subtle methods of analysis such as a comparison of increasing yields in different villages with the level of agronomic propaganda influence, etc. However, they all prove only the trend but do not provide a quantitative estimate of the effect of agronomic propaganda.

In the most general terms, this is the essence of social-agronomic reports: if they meet our requirements, they turn into voluminous works that are not convenient for reading at zemstvo or cooperative meetings and are incomprehensible for peasants. Therefore, the social-agronomic organization should add to the extensive academic report both a short summary of its activities to be read at the zemstvo meeting and a popular brochure to present the social-agronomic work to the general public. The latter is certainly of great importance for popularizing not only social agronomy but also the agronomic innovations it promotes.

social agronomy chayanov's book

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