146 



AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION IN GERMANY. [Sept. 1895. 



abnormally low prices of wheat and rye, which are admittedly 

 below the cost of production, are in themselves a sufficient 

 cause. 



Count V. Kanitz-Podangen, one of the principal agrarian 

 members of the Keichstag, in a pamphlet published in support of 

 a proposal for the State monopoly of the import of grain, asserts 

 that German agriculture began to take a downward course 25 

 years ago, and considers that this was principally due to the 

 Competition of new countries, to whom the improved means of 

 communication by sea and land had given an opportunity of 

 flooding the central European countries with agricultural 

 produce at prices which made it impossible to farm profitably 

 at home. 



The depression is now general throughout the country, but it 

 began earlier, and is more accentuated in the eastern provinces of 

 Prussia — which are purely agricultural and far from the great 

 markets — than in any other part of Germany. In the west, 

 owing chiefly to the beet sugar industry, which is encouraged by 

 bounties, the depression was warded off for some time, but beet 

 growing having now almost ceased to pay, it is felt all the more 

 acutely. 



The principal grain crops, rye, oats, and wheat, are the most 

 important products of German agriculture, and it is generally 

 assumed, and often insisted upon by the representatives of the 

 agricultural interest in the Prussian Parliament and in the 

 Reichstag, that the prosperity of German agriculture depends 

 almost entirely upon the relation between the market price of 

 grain aud its cost of production. They point out that the 

 expenditure of a landed estate is permanent, or tends gradually 

 to increase in consequence of higher wages, the contributions to 

 the State insurance of labourers, increased taxation, &c., whereas 

 the market price of grain is variable and has now fallen to such 

 a point that, even with the greatest care and economy, profitable 

 farming has become iaipossible. 



The question of the cost of production of cereals in Germany is 

 an exceedingly difficult one, and the estimates and assertions that 

 are made on this subject are said to vary too much to afford any 

 reliable data. Corn-growing, cattle breeding, and other branches 

 of agriculture are carried on simultaneously on nearly all farms, 

 and the difierences in the quality of the soil and climatic influences 

 make a general estimate impossible. On the same field the crop 

 in one year may, in consequence of diflerent conditions of 

 weather, be twice what it is in another, while the outgoings 

 remain the same. At the same time, the system of book- keeping 

 employed by agriculturists is not usually a very careful one, so 

 that their calculations are seldom reliable, and in spite of many 

 investigations by writers on agricultural subjects, and by the 

 Royal Experimental Stations, no certain scale of cost has as yet 

 been attained. The opponents of the Agrarian party attribute 

 the high cost of production complained of exclusively to the 



