Page 60 - Changing Living Spaces

Žarko Lazarević

Table 1 Land Ownership Structure in Slovenia in 1931
Size of farm in ha Number in % Land area in %
up to 0.5 11.8 0.4
0.5 – 1 8.5 0.8
1 – 2 12.7 2.3
2 – 5 24.4 9.8
5 – 10 18.7 16.2
10 – 20 15.8 26.9
20 – 50 7.0 24.0
over 50 1.1 19.6
Source Tomasevich 1955, 287.

ry was forests, while 5 percent of the land was not suitable for cultivation
(Lavrič, Mal, and Stele 1939, 327).
The structure of land ownership shows that the distribution of land
was very uneven. On the one hand, many peasants owned tiny plots of
land, and on the other hand, very few peasants owned large tracts of land.
In this context, it should be emphasized that in the case of Slovenia, one
cannot speak of large landholdings with a lot of arable land, since large
farms usually included extensive forest areas. In such cases, the man-
agement of forest potential was the main activity. The 1931 farm survey
showed that one-third of farms were smaller than two hectares, while
one-fourth were up to five hectares in size. The distribution of land also
posed a significant problem for adequate cultivation of the fields. Most
farmers did not own a homogeneous piece of land, but small plots in dif-
ferent locations. There were 1,882,245 plots in Slovenia, far more than the
population. The structure of forest ownership was equally fragmented.
Before World War II forests were distributed among 140,000 owners of a
total of 680,922 hectares of forest. Forest ownership larger than 50 hec-
tares was rare (only 0.5 percent) and accounted for 30 percent of the to-
tal forest area. Most of the forests were owned by farmers who possessed
less than five hectares of forest (Šivic 1939, 344) - in fact, on average only
3.8 hectares (Cimperšek 2016, 147).
In the case of agricultural and forest land, the structure of land owner-
ship was not the only problem. The structure of forest land was even more
worrisome. Few farmers owned a homogeneous piece of land. Usually,
their agricultural or forest holdings consisted of various small parcels of
land in geographically separate locations. All these posed challenges to
proper management of fields and forests. Unsurprisingly, it was found
that small farms were the least profitable and that forests owned by peas-

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