The Central Agricultural Zone was marked by lower living standards for peasants, and an extremely dense and poor rural population. It was surrounded by areas where commercial farming was prevalent: in the Baltic were capitalist farms able to hire wage-labour due to the
Emancipation in 1817 with access to Western grain markets, in
Western Ukraine nobles had established vast
sugar-beet farms, in the fertile
south of Russia, the
Kuban and
northern Caucasus ("
New Russia", where there were fertile virgin lands with little population It was also one of the centres of 'hemp culture', i.e. the cultivation of hemp. The Central Agricultural Zone in 1856, at the time the 'chief granary' of the Empire, was also the area where the gentry were most indebted: 71,3 percent of their
revision souls were mortgaged. The difference between the price of populated and unpopulated land was also less in this region than in non-agricultural regions, such as the Lake region, and land was more expensive in the central agricultural region because landowners realised more rent here than in these other regions. This also led to serfs being cheaper in these areas, as the main income of the gentry came from renting out land, and less came from serf labour; therefore to landowners in the central agricultural zone, land was considered more valuable than the serfs they owned. These areas had few signs of
commercialism, and the
market economy remained weak. Most peasants were involved in a '
natural system of production', selling winter produce and handicraft to pay taxes and buy some new goods for the household, with the general production being geared towards their own food production. In
Tambov Province, in the central agricultural zone, a survey conducted by
zemstvo authorities in the 1880s found that two out of three peasant households could not feed themselves without also simultaneously going into debt; this was made worse by the fact that peasant farmers had to sell off grain in autumn, when prices were low due to high supply, and buy grain in the spring at double the prices – often to the same
kulaks, usurers who could have whole villages indebted, often leaving peasants in need to sell parts of their lands off to pay off their debts. The differences in wealth and living standards of the peasantry between the central agricultural region and the surrounding agricultural areas were rooted in two factors, that is 'local differences in the quality of the soil', and 'historic legacies stretching back to the days of
serfdom'. This population boom were due to land shortage: the population density of Central Russia matched Western Europe, with the average peasant allotment similar in size to those in
Germany and
France (at about 2,6
desyatina, roughly 1,1
hectare in 1900), but with only half the grain yield; this sharp difference from the rest of Europe was caused by the heavily outdated methods used by the Russian peasants in Central Russia: instead of the heavy iron plough low pulled by four to six horses in Western Europe, central Russian farmers often used a light wooden plough pulled by one horse or two oxen; they also used a small hand-sickle compared to the scythe or reaping hook which had been in use in Western Europe for over 50 years; sowing, winnowing and threshing was still done by hand compared to mechanised production in the rest of Europe; the use of chemical fertilisers were greatly below European standards; and advanced field rotations (alternative between cereals and root crops) were still largely unknown, while having been introduced in Western Europe in the mid-eighteenth century during the agricultural revolution. To feed themselves more land was cultivated as few peasants had the money to modernise their farms, and this was accomplished by reducing the amount of communal pasture lands in the
three-field system, which had the effect of reducing the livestock size and therefore also the main source of fertiliser, and exhausting the soil. By the end of the century one in three households did not own a horse, and had to either rent one or attach it to themselves and pull the plow themselves. The seed of further conflict in the central agricultural zone was found in the 'most tempting solution' of the peasantry's land hunger, which they could see every day from their villages: the estates of the squires, with nobles owning one third of all arable land in Russia in the 1870s. By 1905 this number was 22 percent, mainly due to the peasant communes' buying up land, increasing the percentage of peasant landownership to 68 per cent from 58 in the same time-span. The need for more land to cultivate caused by the boom in peasant population also led to one-third of the gentry's land being rented out, often at extortionate prices, with peasants agreeing to high prices out of necessity; this made the rental values increase to seven times the size, and this gave income for the gentry of the late 1800s to live on. Saratov was also the site of the most destruction of gentry property during the
Russian peasant uprising of 1905–6, and it was from these events and this province Stolypin got his conviction confirmed, and which brought him to St. Petersburg with
his agrarian reform whose cornerstone was the abolishing of the communal system and the establishing of a peasant landowning class. Most peasants of Central Russia and the Central Agricultural Region, the communal area to which Stolypin's reforms had been addressed, were not affected, and the reform failed to alter the communal way of life. ==History==