Economic and technological aspects of industrial crops cultivation in the farms of Western Siberia in the early 20th century

Technologies of growing grain crops have been hanging together with the development of productive forces and production relations. A big influence on the type of technologies used (extensive, intensive, etc.), as the whole history of agriculture shows, is provided by some large-scale events that periodically shake society. They destroy the foremost advanced technological structures at this stage of development of the productive forces, simplifying them or de-intensifying them by reducing the production and resource base. Naturally, all this negatively affects the efficiency of the grain economy. On the other hand, the potential of agricultural technologies is revealed and used more fully if they and their constituent components fit into the natural environment of the region, ensuring the most complete use of the bioclimatic resources of the territory. Technologies in agriculture of steppe, forest-steppe and taiga areas differed not only in methods and ways of soil cultivation, but also in the level of mechanization of production processes. In this case, in different parts of the same zone, it could have its own characteristics. In addition, approaches to the preparation and sowing of virgin and arable land were not identical. With the methods of growing grain crops existing in peasant farms, the yield was completely dependent on the amount of precipitation falling in June and the first ten days of July. If there was no precipitation during this period, the harvest was low. More early-maturing, corresponding to local conditions, were the varieties of spring wheat: Chernouska, Belokoloska and Noe, and oats: Shvedsky, Ryikhlik, Shatilovsky, Belian. Studies of those years showed that the technology of growing cereals based on mechanized labor was more productive than manual. And the cost of tithing when using cars was lower than without them.