Chapter 530: Unlucky Bastard
Hit by the agricultural crisis, farmers across Europe were having a hard time. Families with savings were still all right; those without could only go into debt.
They grew their own food, and their daily expenses were not high. Their biggest expense was government taxes. Agricultural taxes were not heavy in most regions; they could scrape the money together if they tried, and if they truly had none, they could postpone payment.
Some countries even reduced or waived taxes, or accepted goods in lieu of tax payments. Only a small number of farmers went bankrupt; most could still get by.
If the agricultural crisis had ended in 1873, it would merely have been a brief episode of bumper harvests driving down agricultural prices for a year—not enough to shake Europe's smallholder economy.
Clearly, that was impossible. When spring arrived in 1873, everyone threw themselves back into production with fervor. Aside from a few countries and regions where grain acreage declined, grain acreage in many places actually rose rather than fell.
It was not that farmers did not know grain prices were poor or that growing grain brought meager returns. The main reason was that generation after generation had grown crops this way. If they did not plant grain, they simply did not know what else to plant.
Austria was among the countries making the greatest effort to reduce grain production capacity. Franz ordered all farms under state-owned agricultural companies to stop growing grain and switch uniformly to cash crops.
If this had been ten-odd years earlier, that single administrative order would have been enough to see Austria through the agricultural crisis.
Unfortunately, times had changed. Many people had joined the land redemption program, and after all these years, state-owned arable land held by the Vienna Government