V
Since the eighteenth century many writers on agriculture, as extensively shown by the other chapters of this volume, have preached the virtues of well-kept accounts. But it is really only the twentieth century that witnessed institutionalized efforts to spread book-keeping among small and medium farmers and to provide services for accounting at relatively low fees or for free. The bulk of this effort was done by the local and national farmers’ associations that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century or that were dramatically reorganized in reaction to the agrarian crisis of the 1870–80s. Attempts at spreading book-keeping and accounting should not be taken in isolation, but should be considered as part of the general role that agricultural elites (experts, politicians, large landowners, officials) took on as ‘guardians’ of the broader agricultural population. Accounting education and services were part of a broader provision of public goods to European farmers which were meant to improve productivity and the standard of living of farmers.
1 G. Federico, Feeding the World: An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800–2000 (2005). This educational effort was often deemed incompatible with double-entry book-keeping, which seemed impractical and cumbersome. If capitalist rationality was part of the modernization of the countryside, it came rather with single-entry simplified book-keeping.
The Swiss and the Dutch case show interesting parallels (the importance of the action of regional and national organizations, the separation of accounting and book-keeping, the increasing role of government), but also important differences: in Groningen and Leeuwarden cooperative models prevailed, with a higher degree of commercialization of the service; in Switzerland the government played a bigger role in funding the accounting office of the SBV and Laur started very early on to use accountancy data to represent the interests of farmers in policy debates. Whereas Laur, from the very beginning, intended the farm accounting office of the Schweizerisches Bauernsekretariat to be an observatory of general economic trends, the Cooperative Centrale Landbouwboekhouding of the Friesland Society of Agriculture and the Central Bureau of the Groningen Society of Agriculture initially responded only to the farmers’ direct needs for precise accounting. Yet, even in the Dutch case, the main function of such accounting offices was not to equip farmers with better management techniques but to help them respond to the needs of the government and of the farmers’ organizations for data.
The polarity became even less pronounced in the inter-war period, when government support for agriculture acquired a dominating role, and Dutch farmers’ organizations integrated their accounting offices into a national network to turn account books into data. The generalization of book-keeping went hand in hand with the integration of family farms within a network of institutions and with extensive state support, as the standard form of agricultural production. It was precisely farmers’ organizations that – with the support of governments – provided farmers with specific accounting services. The representative function of farm accountancy data became crucial for the State and the farmers’ organizations that collected the data, to the point that farm accountancy officers spread across Europe. Switzerland and the Netherlands thus provide an outline of the experience of other European countries, and show how accounting offices arose either to meet the needs of private consulting or policy-making.