Page 63 - Changing Living Spaces

Peasants, Land, and Work

Table 3 Estimated Average Annual Income of Farms in the 1930s in Dinars
Under 2 ha 2–5 ha 5–10 ha 10–20 ha 20–50 ha Over 50 ha
Fields 1,150 3,700 7,100 10,700 14,000 31,000
Meadows and 240 1,430 2,800 5,300 11,000 41,500
pastures
Vineyards 540 1,246 1,500 1,850 2,020 8,000
Gardens and orchards 180 432 750 1,020 1,380 8,000
Forests 45 240 420 2,080 5,240 36,600
Total 2,155 7,048 12,570 20,950 33,640 125,100
Source Uratnik 1938, 61.

percent. Even among farms up to five hectares in size, the percentage of
leased land was 10 percent. Only among the larger farms was this per-
centage statistically insignificant (Uratnik 1938, 53).
The dilemmas of agriculture were presented without any embellish-
ment by Anton Pevc (1924, 5), who wrote the following: ‘In Slovenia it will
be necessary either to increase agricultural production or to reduce the
peasant population by half’. He was also convinced that this would hap-
pen by itself, but that such an outcome should be prevented by agricultur-
al policies that would ensure the restructuring of Slovenian agriculture
for the purpose of more efficient production and an increase in the size of
farms. He was convinced that small farms did not meet the conditions for
long-term economic survival. Meanwhile, another contemporary of Pevc
wrote that small farmers who owned up to two hectares of land had al-
ready approached the position of wage labourers (Möderndorfer 1938, 155).
It was more than obvious that smallholders desperately needed oth-
er sources of income to meet investment or social modernization needs.
Even with leased land, farming was not enough as a main activity. In light
of this information, critical observers questioned who a farmer was in the
first place. They wondered whether the official figures of 154,628 farms in
Slovenia before World War II were even close to being realistic. The crite-
rion they used was precisely the source of income. If most of the peasants’
income came from non-agricultural activities, then, according to the crit-
ics, it was completely unjustified to count the owners of such ‘farms’
and their family members, among the agricultural population. Half of
all farms, the majority of whose income came from non-agricultural sec-
tors, were smaller than a single hectare (Uratnik 1938, 54). This was fol-
lowed by farms up to two hectares in size, and then farms between two
and five hectares in size. Of the total number of all farms whose main in-
come came from the non-farm sector, 84 percent were no larger than five

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