III
From the 1880s, the Aargau Agricultural Society of Aarau, in Switzerland, had organized a ‘winter school’ for farmers who wished to learn book-keeping.
1 The Aargauische landwirtschaftliche Gesellschaft was founded in 1838, Aargauische landwirtschaftliche Gesellschaft (ed.), Die Landwirtschaft im Kanton Aargau: Festschrift zur Feier des 100jährigen Bestehens der Aargauischen landwirtschaftlichen Gesellschaft (1911). The economist Ernst Laur came to teach on this course at the end of the 1890s. The goals of the winter school were not dissimilar from those of the accounting courses in the Netherlands, namely, improving farm management. In his first manual of simplified book-keeping for farmers, Laur stressed that in the modern world, where the farm produced for the market and the farmer’s goal was to make money, new techniques were needed to assess the success of the farm and the value of the soil. He highlighted that ‘the difficulty of the problem (of running a profitable farm) completely excludes the possibility to solve the computations mentally and keep all the different cases in mind’.
2 E. Laur, Die Buchhaltung des Schweizerbauern (1898), p. 4. Modern farm management, in a commercial society, required therefore the adoption of some form of recording system. ‘Through book-keeping’ – Laur continued – ‘the farmer will be able for the first time to judge his own economic action and draw from the experiences of the past useful conclusions for the future’.
Book-keeping was a discipline of self-observation for farmers.
3 On the connection between observation and observance: K. Park, ‘Observation in the Margin, 500–1500’, in L. Daston and E. Lunbeck (eds), Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), pp. 15–44. For Laur, the experience of book-keeping would transform the farmers themselves and their mentality and it would divert them from old habits:
Let us not forget the high educational value of agricultural accounting … Book-keeping stimulates observation and reasoning. It sharpens economic sense and frees agriculturalists from the impressions left by past times and condition that still obscure their gaze.
4 Laur, Die Buchhaltung des Schweizerbauern, p. 6.It was a crucial component of agricultural modernity.
Laur became Professor of Agricultural Economics at the Federal Polytechnical School in Zurich and head of the Secretariat of Swiss peasants of the Swiss Farmers’ Union (SBV). He thus combined an academic position with a political role at the helm of an interest group representing thousands of farmers across the country (almost 93,000 in 1906).
5 Secrétariat des Paysans Suisses, Statistiques et évaluations agricoles (1923), p. 25. His goals expanded accordingly. The Swiss parliament funded the accounting office of the Union in order to ‘collect materials and conduct preliminary studies for an effective representation of farmers’ interests’.
6 Botschaft des Bundesrates an die Bundesversammlung betreffend das Budget für das Jahr 1898, 5 Nov. 1897, p. 269. Laur used such funds to establish in Brugg the accounting office of the SBV, whose task was to assist and instruct Swiss farmers in book-keeping and accounting. While farmers recorded sales and expenses for their own purposes, therefore, the Swiss Farmers Union was also collecting precious data: thousands of account books, which it intended to use to describe the economic situation and interests of Swiss farmers.
Laur’s PhD advisor in Leipzig, Hermann Wilhelm Howard, had established a
Buchführunggesellschaft (accounting society) in the 1870s. Laur’s model for this data-collecting activity, though, was the famous Saxon and then Prussian statistician Ernst Engel. Howard had focused on the profitability of the individual farm and in general preached a business-centric approach. Engel instead had underlined the importance of book-keeping for broader goals of statistical surveillance and practically demonstrated its potential for research. He had aggregated the data provided by the family budgets collected by the Belgian statistician Édouard Ducpétiaux to identify regular relations between the different measures and had thus discovered that the share of food expenses over total expenses, as a rule, decreased when income increased.
7 E. Engel, ‘Die vorherrschenden Gewerbszweige in den Gerichtsämtern mit Beziehung auf die Productions- und Consumtionsverhältnisse des Königreichs Sachsen’, Wirtschaft und Statistik 73 (1857), pp. 126–36; idem, ‘Die Lebenskosten belgischer Arbeiter-Familien früher und jetzt – Ermittelt aus Familien-Haushaltrechnungen und vergleichend zusammengestelt’, Bulletin de l’Institut International de Statistique IX (1895), pp. 1–124. In 1882, in a lecture he gave on the ‘Housewife’s accounting book and its place in the economic life of the nation’, he envisaged the possibility of an institution to collect all the accounting books kept by housewives across Germany in order to centralize them and obtain ‘instruments to measure the welfare of the nation’.
8 E. Engel, Das Rechnungsbuch der Hausfrau und seine Bedeutung im Wirthschaftsleben der Nation: ein Vortrag (1882), pp. 36–7. I am indebted to Max Ehrenfreund for stressing the importance of this citation. Laur had been in contact with Engel when he studied in Leipzig and he clearly recognized the potential of aggregated accountancy data.
In the first years of the century, somewhat more than 100 farmers per year could enrol in the course of the SBV, but many more than this applied. In 1903, for instance, the newspaper of the SBV, the
Bauernzeitung, reported that only half of the applicants to the book-keeping course could be admitted.
9 ‘Buchhaltungkurses des schweizerischen Sekretariates’, Bauernzeitung 3 (3) (Mar. 1903), p. 11. In 1904, only 126 out of 216 applications could be accepted.
10 ‘Buchhaltungkurs des schweizerischen Bauernsekretariates’, Bauernzeitung 2 (4) (Feb. 1904). The
Bauernzeitung claimed that the farmers who took the course were well satisfied by it, and this was confirmed by the high proportion of them who, after keeping accounts for a year, returned their ledger books to the accounting office in Brugg. In 1901, for instance, the newspaper claimed that a majority of participants had been so happy with book-keeping in the first year that they continued keeping accounts for the following ones and only 6 farmers had decided to drop out, for health issues or other justified problems.
11 ‘Die Rentabilitaetserhebungen des schweiz. Bauernsekretariat’, Bauernzeitung 5 (1) (Nov. 1901), pp. 19–20.Even more than in the Dutch case, this number was very small compared to the number of farmers in Switzerland (there were 243,000 farms in 1905 and 238,000 farms in 1929 in the country), even compared to the broad membership of the SBV.
12 Number of farms in 1905: Secrétariat des Paysans Suisses, Statistiques et évaluations agricoles, p. 5; number of farmers in 1929: International Institute of Agriculture, The First World Agricultural Census (1939), III, p. 315. Considering the significant commitment implied by the course, though, such participation testifies to an expanding kernel of highly motivated farmers. What were their motives to attend the courses and open their books to the SBV? The reasons the documents mention include farmers’ concern that they did not overpay for land and their need for precise accounts and inventories to calculate the shares that belonged to different heirs.
13 Walter J. Roth, ‘Farm Accounting Investigations in Switzerland’, Journal of Farm Economics 13 (1931), p. 561. Laur underlined how the need for the SBV accounting assistance was mostly felt by young farmers who had just inherited their farm. He remarked that they rarely continued account-keeping for more than three years and even then often limited themselves to cash-receipts and disbursements after they stopped submitting their records to the central office of the SBV.
14 Ibid., p. 558.While the farmers’ individual needs were essential to motivate farmers, from the very beginning, the SBV accounting office intended to use the data to foster the Union’s political objectives.
15 Laur, Die Buchhaltung des Schweizerbauern, p. 6. By aggregating farm accountancy data, Laur was able to speak about trends that involved the entire agricultural sector and could use his surveys of profitability to establish collective agency for Swiss farmers. On the columns of the
Bauernzeitung, for instance, the Swiss Farmers Union amplified the message of its annual reports on the accountancy data survey and explained how policy proposals concerning health insurance schemes or tariffs affected farmers’ income. The growing membership of the SBV must have been aware of the importance that this data had in enabling them to achieve the collective goals of the organizations. The enemies of the SBV, on the left and on the right, clearly saw the crucial role of these numbers. As late as 1952, Laur’s opponents wrote sarcastically that:
when the figures from Brugg [the seat of the accounting office of the SBV] march in, all mere assumptions and opinions retreat into a quiet corner in the face of this erudition and are ashamed of their impertinence, which is not verified by any science, to have spoken out at all in such a circle.
16 Schweizerischer Verband für Wohnungswesen, ‘Die Rentabilitätserhebungen des schweizerischen Bauernsekretariates im Lichte statistischer Wissenschaft’, Wohnen 27 (1952), pp. 213–14.