Homesteading and teamwork

[Mortblanc]

In America our homesteading law of 1784 allowed for the family land grant of 1/4 section of land to be 160 acres. That was because 160 acres was deemed the most land a farm family could work in the pre-industrial era.

40 acres would be left as woodlot while the remainder was placed in crops.

The land needed to support one human per year was 6 acres. Even if the family had 8 children there would still be surplus production on half the cropped land, insuring that every homesteader made a profit, and had a big family.

During the early agricultural era we find that work was traded as a commodity, carefully recorded and treated as if it were cash. Most farmers kept a transaction book that showed how much labor they had done for each neighbor, and how much was owed to themselves. They also "rented" out their children to other farmers as circumstance allowed.

Daughters were rented out as nannies and domestics, especially when a neighbor wife was ill. This led to many of the May/December marriages on the frontier, as men married the young women that were already functioning in their homes. But that cut down on a lot of other daughter-management problems we face today. A well brought up girl was capable of running her own family much younger than the texting morons we are raising today, plus she would have had Mom and sisters close by.

Plus, if you married her you no longer had to pay her parents for her labor!

It was not the utopian one for all/all for one system proposed in the literature with barn raisings, corn husking and "free labor" at harvest time. You paid for those services one way or another.