Farm acoounts:a source to measure agricultural productivity in Groningen (1762 - 1862)

The article analyses systematically the very detailed information from a large collection of about forty (partly privately owned) farm accounts for the Dutch province of Groningen (the Netherlands) in the period 1762-1862, shedding more light on the development of the agricultural productivity and the standard-of-living in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. The resulting estimates are compared with official statistics available from 1817 onwards. The article shows that old farm accounts – if available in a substantial amount – can be an excellent source to uncover rural economic developments in the pre-statistical area.According to the analysis of these farm accounts, the rather rapid population growth in the period studied resulted in a stagnating or even falling agricultural production per capita - somewhat in line with Mathusian views - in the capitalistic Groningen clay region, despite all kinds of innovations of farmers to make use of the abundantly available cheap labour from the end of the eighteenth century to about 1860. In the same period, local consumption of agricultural products per capita stagnated or even deteriorated. Improving terms of trade, ensured that from 1825 real regional income per capita was increasing, though this improvement was not spent on an increase in the consumption of foodstuffs, but on imported (luxury) industrial goods. It can be concluded that higher food prices from 1830 were indeed an important incentive to attract more agricultural products to the world market, where they were needed to satisfy the increasing demand in industrializing and urbanizing countries outside the Netherlands from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. The figures based on farm accounts for Groningen, a region characterised by very modern and innovative farmers, suggest that productivity growth in agriculture in this first phase of European industrialisation, urbanisation, modernisation and population growth might indeed seriously have lagged behind compared to the industry and service sectors. Consequently, higher real incomes were often accompanied by falling standards-of-living concerning food-intake, as in other parts of the western world in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although suggested otherwise in the literature, this is not really a paradox but actually the logical consequence of diverging developments in industry (and services) on the one hand, and agriculture on the other, that lead to diverging price developments