Peasant Farms (ETW building)
| Peasant Farms | |||||||
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| Category: | Farm | ||||||
| Level: | 0 | ||||||
| Turns to build: | 1 | ||||||
| Building cost: | 300 | ||||||
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| Enables | |||||||
 Tenanted Farms | |||||||
The basis of all agriculture is the humble peasant, labouring in the field to bring in his master’s crops or to keep his master’s animals alive.
Day-to-day life for a peasant farmer has barely changed in a thousand years. It is a short, hard life of abject poverty and backbreaking labour. He can expect nothing better than to work and die in the same village, tilling the same fields, his life bounded by the same horizon. Peasant farms are not terribly efficient: the landowners have little interest in anything beyond their rents and tithes. The problem for them is that peasant economies are, by their very nature, cash poor and most income is in kind, and there is a limit to where you can spend a goat!
Historically, life for a peasant was pretty much the same all over the world: work from dawn to dusk. In Russia, the peasants were serfs tied to the land and the property of the landowner as much as any cow or goat. In India, peasants were a caste locked into their social position by hallowed custom. The system eventually broke down in Western Europe thanks to industrialization needing a constant supply of workers and changes in land usage.