Page 59 - Changing Living Spaces

Peasants, Land, and Work

Although Jamnik referred to two generalized and idealized types of
farms (two extremes), his analysis illustrates the severity of economic
problems in agriculture and the social plight of the peasant population.
The first type of farm was highly prevalent in the countryside. They had
extremely low yields. Income from agriculture was insufficient to meet
the needs of social and economic modernization. New income could only
be generated through non-agricultural activities.
In the countryside, all these processes occurred spontaneously, auto-
matically and slowly. It was a generally accepted fact that the agrarian
economy involved a combination of different, complementary, knowledge
and experiences, and thus also formed the basis for the economic initi-
atives of the peasant population in different directions when opportu-
nities arose or there was a demand in the wider economic area. Like any
other activity, agriculture is not one-sided. Farms and rural areas as a
community are a microcosm in which various economic and inter-branch
relationships intertwined (Lazarević 2014b, 46–62). Measures to diversi-
fy farm income further tied peasants as communities and individuals to
the world of the capitalist economy. It also allowed them to imagine the
world beyond agricultural self-sufficiency and provided space for social
modernization, which was one of the fundamental drivers of economic
modernization and income diversification.
It was normal for the agricultural population to be engaged in various
aspects of the economy – not necessarily all the time, but in parallel with
agricultural activities. Farms were thus a multifaceted economic space in
which necessity or expected utility dictated the choice of economic activ-
ities in addition to agriculture. In such a context of the peasant economy,
peasants pragmatically pursued various activities to increase and diver-
sify their income. To achieve this goal, they were not only willing to work
and learn, but also to change the organization of sales activities. The dy-
namics of change were also present. In the long run, individual non-agri-
cultural activities appeared or disappeared, depending on the social and
economic context of the wider environment.

Land Ownership Structure
In the interwar period, the fragmentation of land ownership was one of
the basic facts that determined the results of agricultural work, the struc-
ture of the agrarian economy and the standard of living in the country-
side. Half of the entire Slovenian territory was devoted to agriculture
(fields, gardens, meadows, pastures, vineyards); 45 percent of the territo-

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