Farmland

The big yellow sun fills the air with warmth, the brightly colored blooming fields send pollen in to the sky, the animals make new members for their flocks of fur and feather, and you selfishly recline on your grandfather's rocking chair happily doing nothing. Of course most days you are turning one thing or another into firewood or fodder, but today is sunday, and the lazy land-tender is tending to himself. Farm control and ownership has traditionally been a key indicator of status and power, especially in Medieval European agrarian societies. The distribution of farm ownership has historically been closely linked to form of government. Medieval feudalism was essentially a system that centralized control of farmland, control of farm labor and political power, while the early American democracy, in which land ownership was a prerequisite for voting rights, was built on relatively easy paths to individual farm ownership. However, the gradual modernization and mechanization of farming, which greatly increases both the efficiency and capital requirements of farming, has led to increasingly large farms. This has usually been accompanied by the decoupling of political power from farm ownership. In some societies (especially socialist and communist), collective farming is the norm, with either government ownership of the land or common ownership by a local group.