450 



THE SIZE AND TENURE OF FARMS IN FRANCE. 



The publication about a year ago of the results of the 1 895 

 enquiry into the number, extent, and distribution of the 

 agricultural holdings of Great Britain lends a special interest 

 to the tables still more lately issued by the French Ministry 

 ot Agriculture, giving the conclusions of the special enquiry, 

 undertaken in 1892 in that country, into the rural economy 

 and conditions of farming tenure in France. Explanatory 

 official reports on the statistics, with comparative summaries 

 of the very exhaustive investigations made, are not yet 

 forthcoming ; but the figures themselves, as issued, enable a 

 general impression to be formed as to the size of the farms 

 into which the agricultural area of France is divided, and 

 the extent to which they are cultivated by their owners. 

 The date of these returns is ten years later than that for 

 which similar French statistics have been previously 

 available. 



The entire area brought under review covers 124,656,000 

 acres, a surface which, it is to be remembered, includes 

 23,500,000 acres of woods and forests, and nearly 15,400,000 

 acres of uncultivated but partially grazed wastes, probably not 

 dissimilar in character to the rough grasses of the mountain 

 and heath land of our own agricultural returns. Leaving out 

 the woods and uncultivated land, the territory under cultiva- 

 tion is more than two and a-half times the apparently similar 

 area of Great Britain. It is divided into more than ten 

 times as many farms, for an area of some 85,759,000 acres is 

 accounted for as farmed in 5,618,000 separate holdings. 

 These holdings apparently average in extent just one- 

 fourth of our own, or a little over 15 against 63 acres 



