ABSTRACT
Tuscan agriculture has changed more in the last forty years than in the preceding four hundred, and the transformations documented in this case study are encompassed in the experience of one generation. The older farmers on both sides of the river Orcia grew up within a share-cropping system which at estate level produced food for an urban population and raw materials for manufacturing, but at the level of the farm produced for the subsistence needs of the household. This dual character of the mezzadria, although subject to variations and a slow evolution which were described in the second chapter, meant that the bulk of the rural population had little direct contact with a market economy. Today farming is oriented towards production for the market and a cash income, but there are striking contrasts between the economic institutions which have emerged on each side of the river. To the north, after a rural exodus, there emerged large estates investing capital in quality wine production based on wage-labour. To the south the land-reform of the early 1950s created an agricultural system based on small farms worked with family labour. Incorporation within the market was more gradual as the reform consolidated a farming sector directed towards supplying a substantial part of the subsistence needs of the household. However, the economic significance of this subsistence sphere has declined, and in the last ten years there has been a rise in off-farm employment and a general impoverishment of local agriculture, with the majority of the farms practising a cereals monoculture.
