_To each male of the Xth census:_ _Ranenburg. _Dankoff. Dessiatines._ Dessiatines._ Former serfs 2.4 2.7 Former state peasants 4.3 4.6 This inequality is due to the influence of landlord interests upon the reform of 1861, considerable tracts of land having been cut off from the former peasant possessions and granted in absolute property to the masters.[25] It goes without saying that the free peasant must have sunk below the level of the serf. By the side of the former serfs even the state peasants appear as an “upper class.” And yet the average quantity of land held by the state peasants falls short of the extent proved by experience to be necessary for farming in the districts under consideration. Want of land urged the peasant to convert everything into arable land, and that to such an extent that no improvements worth mentioning were left for the use of the cattle. The total hay yield of the meadows belonging to the peasants who live under agrarian communism[26], is 458,000 poods[27], and this has to be distributed among 83,079 head of large cattle[28]. This makes on an average 5½ _poods_, _i. e._ 200 pounds to every head for the Russian winter, lasting at least half a year. In other words, there is about _one pound of hay a day_ for every head of cattle. Nor is the condition any better in the summer, since the pastures, where there are any, are very scanty; and this is due to conversion of pasture into arable land, as already mentioned, as well as into homesteads for the increased population. This reduces to a paltry figure the number of cattle raised by the peasants.[29] Two working horses to a farm can hardly be considered as representing, even for Russian agriculture, a particularly high standard. The actual extent to which stock-breeding is carried on by the peasants falls below even this minimum, save among the 415 quarterly proprietors in the Ranenburg district, who are a kind of peasant “four hundred” in their own way, owing to the extent of allotted land that they own. The depressed condition of stock-breeding reacts in its turn upon agriculture. Apart from this there is another universal cause that diverts the cattle manure from its natural use. I refer to the lack of woods.