Leading the first data revolution in European agriculture: farm accountancy data and their impact 1870-1945

Project Information

datarev

Grant agreement ID: 949722

DOI

10.3030/949722

EC signature date 19 November 2020

Start date 1 September 2021

End date 31 August 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 500 000,00

Coordinated by

ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA DI BOLOGNA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - datarev (Leading the first data revolution in European agriculture: farm accountancy data and their impact 1870-1945)

Reporting period: 2024-09-01 to 2025-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Long before Big Data invaded the countryside with datafication and High Precision Farming in the 2010s, another data-revolution had taken place in Europe. The spread of book keeping to ordinary farmers that started in the second half of the 19th century represents a revolutionary phenomenon whose importance and magnitude have been underestimated by historians. After overseas competition hit European farmers in the 1870s, the diffusion of bookkeeping techniques among ordinary European farmers was an important component of the recovery. The farm accountancy offices that mushroomed in northern and central Europe thanks to the work of economists and agricultural unions were crucial to reach medium and small farmers. Such offices acted as consulting agencies to farmers, helping them manage their farms more efficiently. But the offices also aggregated farm accountancy data from individual farms to produce benchmarks and for statistical purposes. Farmers unions could thus use micro-data to enlighten macro-economic issues and guide policy decisions at different levels in a striking example of “stakeholders’ statistics.”
DATAREV investigates the diffusion of farm accountancy offices of continental Europe since the 1870s and the use of farm accountancy data by state and non-state actors in the first half of the 20th century.
With its five subprojects, DATAREV thoroughly explores different aspect of the first data revolution, its actors and its consequences. It examines how economic and socially change was conceptualized and direct through accountancy data and statistics and how the peculiar structure of the agricultural business in Europe imposed constraints on bookkeeping unlike those at work in industry. It questions the agency in the datafication process and explores the conflicting claims to the data. Finally, it clarifies how farm accountancy data played a crucial role in the reorganization of the governance of European agriculture after the Long Depression.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

1. The first Datarev project conference, dedicated to the First Globalization, with invited international speakers on September 1st, 2022, was very successful. The conference was in hybrid format, not just due to Covid but also to save costs and reduce our CO2 footprint (https://datarev.univie.ac.at/activities/talks/einzelseite/news/the-final-programme-for-our-conference-is-now-available/).
2. The team completed the digitizing process of the primary source for sub-project No. 2, "Agriculturalists and the Great Depression," which is the Recueil de statistique basées sur les données de la comptabilité agricole. This source collected data for the agricultural years 1927-1928 to 1936-1937. We cleaned and standardized the data on a country level. Through descriptive analysis, we gained preliminary results on the changes in agricultural productivity and efficiency caused by the Great Depression. The major issue that we had to deal with was the choice of the countries that we include in the standardized and balanced dataset. At the moment, we had to limit the dataset to 10 European countries.
3. Several publications are under preparation and 2 are submitted
4. The project has joined the IRN “Covar” that will open possibilities for international cooperation
5. D’Onofrio, F, “The intentional spread of farm accountancy offices in Switzerland and the Netherlands, 1870-1950” in Joly, Nathalie, Federico D’Onofrio (eds), Farm Accounts in Rural Europe, c. 1700-1914 (2025)
6. Joly N., D’Onofrio, F., (2025), “Introduction” in D’Onofrio, F. and Joly, N. (eds), Farm Accounts in Rural Europe, c. 1700-1914, Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, pp. 1-27.
7. D’Onofrio F, Mignemi N., ‘Making perfect markets: The demand for global numbers at the origin of the International Institute of Agriculture’, in the Journal of World History Vol.36 Nr.3 (2025)

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

How to assess the resilience of farmers in the face to economic crises? How did farmers react to the globalization of markets and their new role in the world economy? What makes data relevant to policy? These questions are particularly relevant in the current situation, when farmers across Europe are protesting against their loss of control over production in the globalised market. DATAREV is already proposing new answers, thanks, to a great extent, to the two databases that lie at its core: the farm accountancy data database and the prosopography database of the international agrarian movement.
Resilience: The state of the art on the Great Depression in agriculture has significantly evolved since the start of the project, with new publications focusing on the so called “productivity paradox” and the first publications on European agriculture during the Depression coming out. In this changing research environment, the DATAREV database enabled Dr Marina Chuchko to introduce radically new elements about the dynamics of farm productivity during the late 1920s to 1930s focusing on Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe. This period, marked by significant economic turmoil (the Great Depression), provides a unique context to study the resilience and productivity of agricultural systems. The overarching goal is to understand how different farming systems responded to and evolved during this economic downturn, offering valuable lessons for current and future agricultural challenges. The dataset then was analysed using the Growth Accounting Approach to examine the productivity dynamic across different farming systems in the selected countries. The preliminary results of this research entitled “European Agriculture and the Great Depression: Productivity Growth and Farming Resilience” were accepted to be presented at two prominent conferences in Economic History and reveal an unexpected size of the fall in productivity but also the very diverse effects of the crisis in different European countries.
Global markets: the database of agrarian organizations is providing an impressive image of the density of connections linking European and world agrarians. Farmers’ organizations acted in a much thicker international network than previously claimed. Then as now, the world of farmers was divided internally and felt under threat from market forces beyond farmers control. Data were central to their effort to get a grasp of a change world.
The project focused therefore on the way agriculturalists mobilized data on agricultural production and farm profitability to steer policymaking. These results have now begun to appear in D’Onofrio’s work on the International Institute of Agriculture (together with Niccolò Mignemi) and in two more articles in preparation.
Data for policy: A lot more of work is needed to advance our understanding of the way data needs to be conceived and packaged - what we call “the life-cycle of data” – in order to affect policies. The project is now furthering our understanding of statistical representativeness through history (a joint paper by D’Onofrio and Chuchko was presented in Venice in February 2024) and the mobilization of people behind data collection (D’Onofrio’s chapter on accountancy data and Lichani’s paper to be presented in Lausanne in June 2024).

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