I'm trying to imagine this in Frogland where, under Napoleonic inheritance laws, a farm got divided up by the number of kids, and as they couldn't give chunks to each one, as that would mean some got better than others, they had to divvy up the good bits, the medium bits and the bad bits. leading to massive fragmentation, smaller farms and farmers flipping around to drive animals or machinery from one tiny field to another. Which is why not long after the war, despite 1/6 of all workers in France being somehow in "agriculture" they had the worst productivity and Brit farmers were miles ahead of them, there only being about 500,000 Brits on the land. So massive amounts of subsitence farming.
This all changed of course, pushed by France and the CAP.
The main objective of this paper is to review French agricultural policies since the 1960’s and their consequences.In 1945, as a legacy of the Second World War, France was suffering heavy food shortages. Modernisation of agriculture had been very slow during the first part of the 20th century...
books.openedition.org
In case anyone can BA!