A century in Estonian agriculture
Sometimes one must look back in order to move forward. We celebrated 100 years of Estonian Republic on 24 th of February, and this century has been a turbulent one for our agriculture. Declaration of independence in 1918 had profound impact not only from political point of view but also for everyday rural life. The young republic carried out a radical land reform, transferring land ownership from the large estates mostly owned by the Baltic German aristocratic minority to the mostly ethnic Estonian farmers. The reform was not based on ethnicity though but solely on the size of the estate. Of course there had been a pre-history to that story. Servitude had been abolished in Estonia over a century earlier and more wealthy among Estonian farmers had been buying farms from the land-lords for more than half century. Nevertheless significant part of less well-off Estonian peasant population remained landless. All this changed in 1919 – the young republic, still at its Liberation War, ...