Main ideas and methods of social agronomy (Part I)

From the previous chapters, we know that this program has to be laconic. It has to consist of only those elements that, first, allow the meeting of the general needs of the entire region, and, second, ensure the quickest and most powerful economic-social effect.

Paragraphs of the program are to be completely technically specified. We should not only promote grass cultivation but also set the recommended crop rotation, the composition of grass mixtures, and the methods of tillage and sowing. In the paragraph about plows, we have to name the promoted companies and brands according to the soil and other features of the economy and take into account the type of propulsive force. To improve the livestock production, we have to develop a detailed program for crossbreeding or breeding depending on the local livestock and economic tasks, etc.

Having set the content of the social-agronomic program, we have to develop forms of its educational implementation, i.e., to identify by what methods its paragraphs can be implemented. We need to determine in which cases we should use oral propaganda, in which cases we should use demonstrations and experiments, when training courses can be very useful, and where the help of cooperatives is especially needed. Such specification determines the whole set of necessary social-agronomic actions; without such specification we cannot proceed to designing a social-agronomic organization capable of solving all the tasks.

Chapter 5. Agronomic organization

In the previous chapters, we intentionally did not mention the words `social agronomist' and used the term `social agronomy' to emphasize that we talk not about individual agronomic workers of the zemstvo, state, or cooperative offices, but about the whole public-state institution formed by the unity of actions and the guiding will. This unity of social-agronomic actions is primarily determined by the unity of the organizational plan of the agricultural enterprise. Because it is impossible to consider any branch of agriculture separately from all others, measures for changing any branch of the economy should not be implemented without careful coordination with measures affecting other branches of this economy. Therefore, the whole institution of social agronomy rather than individual specialists has to diagnose local agricultural needs, develop programs of social-agronomic work, and control their implementation.

As we already know, forms of social-agronomic work are extremely diverse. They range from oral presentations, visual presentations that vary from wall posters to demonstrations of machinery, to a model experiment or a whole model plot. They also include popular literature and agricultural periodicals, organizations of all kinds of zemstvo enterprises, participation in cooperatives, special technical consultations for peasants, and other forms. If we admit that social agronomy constantly needs tireless research as the only basis for its productive activities, then the scope of the social-agronomic actions becomes extremely large and diverse and requires a great variety of knowledge and practical skills. It is obvious that to implement all the above-mentioned measures, we need a large staff of different specialists who would organize their work on the principle of complex cooperation and more or less follow the principle of the division of labor. In other words, gathering staff for social agronomy is a serious and complex organizational challenge.

The art of the organizer of large-scale activities implies the successful achievement of three main goals.

I. It is necessary to divide a complex action into a series of elementary processes -- simple to perform and accessible to the average performer.

II. It is necessary to coordinate the whole mass of individual elementary processes in time and space to ensure an overall result of their coordinated action.

III. When setting goals and dividing complex actions, it is necessary to rely strictly on the means at the disposal of the organizer and to pay special attention to the correct account of forces and abilities. On the one hand, it is unacceptable to put difficult and hard work on the shoulders of people who cannot cope because of personal qualities; on the other hand, it is economically and socially not profitable to involve qualified employees in the tasks that can be solved by less gifted and trained people.

A good illustration are usual statistical censuses; their technique has been perfectly developed in recent decades. According to the statistical tasks, one day the census institution is to talk with millions of the country's residents and ask them personally about the gender and age composition of their families, employment, literacy, etc. These data are to be calculated and studied in detail in different perspectives in the shortest possible time, which is an extremely difficult and hard task.

However, a well-developed method makes it easy to solve. The country is divided into census areas and smaller regions that are divided into census divisions -- small territories administered by experienced statisticians; the census division is divided into a few dozen enumeration districts to which census takers are assigned.

Before the census day, the special staff prepares lists of villages and, for cities, lists of householders based on old data and preliminary surveys. In each enumeration district, a sufficient number of questionnaires is prepared (one per resident), in which the census questions are specified and printed together with columns for answers. The questionnaires are given to every census taker.

A few days before the census, the census taker goes around his district, informs the population about the future census, collects preliminary data and sometimes distributes census forms for self-reporting. On the census day, the census taker visits all residents, collects the completed forms or fills them in himself. All this work is monitored by the head of the enumeration district and his assistant. The collected data are checked and criticized by inspectors who pass the data to the special staff preparing questionnaires for counting. Workers in the statistical office group the questionnaires according to various criteria and then count them. The results are grouped in special tables and counted by other workers. The final results are analyzed by scientists who write and publish the census report.

Thus, we see how a complex task is divided into a number of elementary ones, how elementary actions aimed at solving elementary tasks are coordinated in time and space, and how coordination of elementary actions ensures a general complex result. Something similar should be done with any complex task, including the social-agronomic work.

When solving separate tasks given to him, every agronomic worker can devote all his attention and energy to only the technical aspects of solving tasks. However, the will of the entire social agronomy institution that guides him has to combine the individual actions of agronomic workers to ensure a unified impact on agriculture as a whole, taking into account its social-economic complexity.

When describing specific forms that allow solutions to organizational problems, first we have to emphasize that the existing types of agronomic organizations are determined not so much by the logical development of some organizational idea as by the historical evolution that depends on and adapts to a variety of temporal-spatial conditions. Therefore, in different countries and even different regions of the same country, we see various organizational types of social-agronomic work that are determined by differences in the structure of the state and society. They are also determined by the struggle of social groups and classes and, finally, by the structure of those organizations that were founders and developers of social agronomy.

Often we see pathological forms and even competing agronomic organizations that are hostile to each other. Moreover, forms of agronomic organizations are never ossified. They constantly move from one phase of evolutionary development to another and change under the pressure of changes in the content of agronomic work and even under the influence of the social-political conditions of the time.

In Russia, this evolution has already completed three stages in the development of the organizational forms of social agronomy. Those stages are: 1) when there was one agronomist per uyezd -- the extensive stage; 2) the district agronomy development -- when intensification of agronomic work determined an increase in the number of agronomic workers in proportion to the territory and limited the area of each agronomist's activities to a relatively small one; and 3) the current period, which combines the work of district agronomists with the work of specialists in different sectors of the economy. This marks the further intensification of agronomic work. Each stage produced its own relevant organizational forms.

Our tasks do not include an ideographic description of the history of agronomic organizations. Therefore, we will focus on the study of the main organizational issues. To understand clearly the organizational features of any agronomic organization, we have to answer the following questions:

1) Of what people and bodies does the agronomic organization consist?

2) Which bodies set tasks and questions of the social-agronomic work?

3) Which bodies make decisions and, according to them, develop programs of the social-agronomic actions?

4) Which departments authorize these decisions and approve the developed measures?

5) How is the executive apparatus organized?

6) How is the unity of the social-agronomic will ensured?

7) How are accounting and control over the social-agronomic work ensured?

8) How is the system of the social-agronomic measures funded?

When using these questions to consider the existing agronomic organizations of Russia, Western Europe, and America, we first have to admit that agronomic organizations are very rarely established as free enterprises of people who unite in education societies, labor artels of agronomists, or special consulting agronomic bureaus for ideas or earnings. In most cases, agronomic organizations are created by the rural population, represented by the state, local self-governments, or cooperatives to meet their agricultural needs.

This fact affects the nature of agronomic organizations by creating them from two elements: first, elected representatives of the local population (zemstvo administrations or boards of cooperatives); and second, invited specialists-agronomists doing the work. This dualism in the organizational structure extremely complicates the issues of the governing will, initiative, control, and so on.

On the one hand, certainly, representatives of the most organized population have to play a guiding role, because this population will `acquire' an agronomic organization to serve its needs. Therefore, it has to set tasks, lead in their development and solution according to local needs and conditions, control all works, and request reports. On the other hand, it is equally certain that the social agronomist should not be a soulless executor of someone's orders. Slave psychology is unacceptable in the creative work of the agronomist, where теория sometimes enthusiastic inspiration means much more than methodological diligence.

Because of its importance, the work of social agronomy goes beyond uyezds and provinces. The rise of the country's agricultural life is a common civil concern, and the agronomist who dedicates his life to this great concern is the same public figure as an elected representative of the population. He certainly serves not so much the population of a certain patch of land as the task of the general, agricultural revival of his homeland.

Therefore, because councils and boards of cooperatives represent the local population, agronomists of agronomic organizations represent social agronomy. Some social agronomists even argue that the population representatives are only to set tasks and the general direction of work and to approve reports, whereas the rest -- specification of tasks, development of relevant measures, their implementation and control -- should be provided only by practical workers, i.e., the third element.

We do not agree with this extreme point of view and believe instead that the whole scope of work should be performed by a board consisting of representatives of both local population and the agronomic community. On issues of a general and fundamental nature, representatives of the local population should have some dominance, and on technical-organizational issues, representatives of the agronomic work should.

According to this rule, the Russian zemstvo agronomy developed two types of collegiate bodies governing the work of social agronomy: the economic council and the agronomic council. The former consists mainly of elected representatives of the population, is in charge of all fundamental issues of the region's economic life, and is responsible to the zemstvo assembly of heads of social-agronomic work and other economic activities. In contrast, the agronomic council consists mainly of representatives of the agronomic community, i.e., the third element. The agronomic council directs the work of agronomists within the domains set by the economic council and has to pre-develop all issues submitted to the economic council.

These are the bodies that represent the organized social-agronomic mind and will, directing and governing agronomic work under the supreme supervision and sanction of the population represented by the zemstvo assembly.

Let us now proceed to the analysis of the executive staff. When comparing Italian and Russian social agronomies, we can distinguish two types of executive staff: in Italy, the area served by the agronomic organization (cattedra ambulanta) is not divided, and all members of the organization serve it together, sometimes specializing in a particular sector of the economy, i.e., the division of labor is object-oriented. In Russia, after the introduction of district agronomy, the agronomic organization is based on the principle of the territorial division of labor, and the majority of work is performed by district agronomists serving a certain small territory in all sectors of agriculture. This organizational type is based on the unity of the organizational plan of the peasant economy and on the fact that all its sectors are so closely connected that any separation is undesirable.

However, this principle does not contradict the availability of specialists who serve certain sectors of the economy: they specialize in animal husbandry, dairy husbandry, gardening and horticulture, beekeeping, flax cultivation, and cooperation. They all collaborate with district agronomists in the technical consulting of the population in different sectors of the economy and do not influence the work of district agronomists on changing the organization of economies in general. Thus, even with the assistance of technical specialists, agronomic reform and its management are entirely the duty and responsibility of district agronomists.

The object-oriented division of labor in agronomic organizations is not limited to the division of the staff into district agronomists and specialists. It goes further and introduces the position of the uyezd agronomist. His duties include representing the agronomic organization, bookkeeping and reports, counselling zemstvo administrations on agricultural issues, and supervising all-uyezd agronomic institutions and undertakings, such as agricultural warehouses, courses for peasants, exhibitions, etc. The duties of the district agronomist are sometimes performed in turn by all district agronomists. They are performed more often by the district agronomist of a suburban area and are significantly reduced to make his work easier. However, as a rule, the all-uyezd special duties are so numerous that a special person with a special assistant clerk is needed to perform them,

The special uyezd agronomist sometimes does not have a special position on the agronomic board. Because of his personal authority, he becomes a spiritual leader for the entire agronomic family. Sometimes he becomes the formal head of the agronomic organization and personifies its will, ensures its unity, and possesses the right to control and inspect the work of other members of the board.

Besides the already mentioned positions, the agronomic staff includes `support personnel' who are not a part of the agronomic board and perform only executive functions. They include all kinds of agricultural headmen, master-hands, junior instructors, and so on. `Trainees' hold an intermediate position between agronomists and support personnel. These future agronomists are mainly students who do their practical training as agronomic support staff.

This is, in short, the system of the uyezd social-agronomic organization practically developed by the Russian zemstvo agronomy <...> The uyezd social-agronomic organization is a complete, working organism and a part of the provincial agronomic organization. The relationships of the uyezd organization with the provincial organization are still to be established by agronomic practice. теория Uyezd zemstvos and provincial zemstvos are not subordinate, and the division of their work in most branches is based on cooperation that should not limit the independence, equality, and freedom of zemstvos' initiatives. According to the Russian agronomic congresses, the local practical work is to be done by uyezd agronomic organizations, whereas the provincial zemstvo is to unite the activities of uyezd zemstvos, to develop common provincial activities initiated by provincial or uyezd zemstvos, and to support financially the weakest uyezd zemstvos. Moreover, the provincial zemstvo can take independent social-agronomic measures that are of general importance or impossible for individual uyezd zemstvos: research, courses, experiments, zoo-technical measures, etc.

In its structure, the provincial agronomic organization is similar to the collegiate bodies of the uyezd organization. Its distinctive feature is that a significant part of the provincial agronomic council or congress and almost the entire executive staff are representatives of uyezds and are not in the service of the provincial zemstvo. Therefore, the unity of the agronomic will and its working discipline are maintained only by the authority of the provincial organization and indirectly by the financial dependence of some uyezd zemstvos on the provincial zemstvo.

This is the scheme of the extremely complex Russian agronomic organization. Because of the introduction of the volost zemstvo, this scheme will change significantly, but this is a matter for the future, which we have no data to predict.

To conclude our essay, we will consider one extremely important and pressing issue of agronomic development. As we have already shown, the governing will in social-agronomic work belongs to collegiate bodies, but the practical work remains individual. It is very important to find out for what cases the collegiality of decisions is absolutely necessary and for what cases the right to decide can be granted to executors.

A lack of collegiality destroys the unity of agronomic work and weakens its unanimity and strength. On the other hand, the application of a collegial form of discussions and solutions to a very wide range of everyday agronomic issues leads to `collegiality hypertrophy', which makes us spend more time on endless meetings than on work. There are cases in which agronomists have spent more than a hundred days at meetings in a year. Certainly, this situation is undesirable. We believe that only issues of fundamental importance, guiding activities of local workers, or of a general nature are subject to collegial decisions. The unity of the agronomic will can be ensured by cooperation of uyezd and provincial agronomists responsible in every action to the collegiate bodies and acting on their behalf and by their authority.

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