One of the principal duties of local governors from the time of the Daika reforms was to encourage agriculture. A rescript issued by the Empress Gensho in the year 715 declared that to enrich the people was to make the country prosperous, and went on to condemn the practice of devoting attention to rice culture only and neglecting upland crops, so that, in the event of a failure of the former, the latter did not constitute a substitute. It was therefore ordered that barley and millet should be assiduously grown, and each farmer was required to lay down two tan (2/3 acre) annually of these upland cereals. Repeated proclamations during the eighth century bear witness to official solicitude in this matter, and in 723 there is recorded a distribution of two koku (nearly ten bushels) of seeds, ten feet of cotton cloth, and a hoe (kuwa) to each agriculturist throughout the empire. Such largesse suggests a colossal operation, but, in fact, it meant little more than the remission of about a year's taxes. Necessarily, as the population increased, corresponding extension of the cultivated area became desirable, and already, in the year 722, a work of reclamation on a grand scale was officially undertaken by organizing a body of peasants and sending them to bring under culture a million cho (two and a half million acres) of new land. This interesting measure is recorded without any details whatever. Private initiative was also liberally encouraged. An Imperial rescript promised that any farmer harvesting three thousand koku (fifteen thousand bushels) of cereals from land reclaimed by himself should receive the sixth class order of merit (kun roku-to), while a crop of over a thousand koku and less than three thousand would carry lifelong exemption from forced labour. The Daika principle that the land was wholly the property of the Crown had thus to yield partially to the urgency of the situation, and during the third decade of the eighth century it was enacted that, if a man reclaimed land by utilizing aqueducts and reservoirs already in existence, the land should belong to him for his lifetime, while if the reservoirs and aqueducts were of his own construction, the right of property should be valid for three generations.* From the operation of this law the provincial governors were excepted; the usufruct of lands reclaimed by them was limited to the term of their tenure of office, though, as related already, legislation in their case varied greatly from time to time. *This system was called Sansei-isshin no ho. It is, perhaps, advisable to note that the Daika system of dividing the land for sustenance purposes applied only to land already under cultivation.