even most of those peasants who hunt for furs, prospect for gold, or trade with the native Finns, only use these occupations to supplement the returns from their land. The usual allotment for a peasant living in a village commune is forty acres, with additional allotments for each adult son who remains with the head of the family. The system of continual wheat cropping is generally in vogue, whereby the land after exhaustion is fallowed while fresh is being broken up.
Some of the peasants have adopted a rough rotation system, whereby out of these forty acres about eighteen are sown with oats, rye, and sometimes wheat, ten are laid fallow, and twelve kept under grass. Manure is never used, and is generally piled up outside the village to be swept away by the spring floods. The land, however, is so rich that it yields in favourable places an average of thirty bushels of cereals to the acre without any manure. Villages near the forest zone grow less wheat and more rye and oats than those nearer to the steppes. In the former case the severe climate causes the wheat yields to average no more than twenty bushels to the acre and sometimes to fail altogether in the autumn frost.[1] In the Southern Yenisei Government the writer found that the live stock kept by a peasant householder usually amounted to about two horses, five cattle and ten sheep. The peasants here generally utilized the products of their fields as follows. All the hay and oats were kept for the winter use of the stock, while the product of the wheat and rye was used in part for household consumption, and in part for sale at the annual fair
- ↑ This occurred in 1911, and a famine resulted in some parts, as a consequence.
