The fundamental facts about the home conditions of these people, so far as they were farmers at home, were the smallness of their holdings, their intensive cultivation, and the almost universal village type of life. Travelers of about 1840 describe the typical middle Rhine country as a highly cultivated plain without division hedges or fences other than the tree-bordered roads, with no separate farm dwellings and with no livestock in sight. The crops of several kinds being arranged in various shaped fields, patches, and strips, the plain looked like the proverbial "crazy-quilt." Villages were huddled at the edges of woods, and occasionally in the midst of the cultivated area. Their houses, which were not arranged on a regular plan, were usually large stone structures, the farm yard, with tools, implements, manure and compost heaps, occupying a kind of court at the rear.
As a rule, all animals were housed winter and summer. Here was an important difference to the farming of the north, where large herds of cattle could be seen pasturing ample meadows, or ruminating in the shade of buildings or of woods. The soiling system was universally practiced in summer. Grass land being scarce and precious, feed for the cows was laboriously gathered along the brookside, in the open spaces of the forest, along all the roads, in the cemeteries, and the greens before the houses. The weeds and thinnings from the growing crops went to the same object. Vegetable tops were a great resource in late summer and fall, and patches of clover, while insuring green feed, furnished hay as well. In places the growing of sugar beets for the market was a leading agricultural enterprise, and the tops of the beets were carefully cured for winter feed.
The cultivation was intensive both in that it aimed at the maximum produce from given areas, and in that the crops raised included some which called for very special
