Let us next proceed eastward or a little south of east from the Franco Belgian center of agriculture. There the change in agriculture is slower than in any other direction, for the climatic change is also slow. Thus southern Germany, western Czecho-Slovakia, and the lowlands of Austria have an intensive type of varied agriculture almost equal to that of northern France. Farther east in Hungary and Rumania the warm continental summers cause corn and grapes to be prominent farm products. In fact so far as variety of products is concerned Hungary outranks northern France. Nevertheless, the care with which agri culture is carried on begins to diminish. Even in Hungary this is manifest in the concentration on cereals. Wheat and corn in nearly equal amounts occupy over half the cropped land, and rye, barley, and oats another quarter. Fruit and vegetables occupy less space than in northern France; there is more waste land, less attention is paid to manuring and fertilization of the soil, less care is given to rotation, and there is a greater tendency for the farmer to cultivate one or two especially profitable crops rather than a great variety. At the same time the total number of domestic animals increases in proportion to the population.
In Rumania and southern Russia these tendencies become much more pronounced. A farm tends to become merely a place where three crops are rotated, wheat or barley, hay, and one other, with almost no trees, few vegetables, and almost no small fruits, aside from grapes. Fields of corn, potatoes, rye, oats, flax, and tobacco are indeed seen here and there, and in the region around Kiev sugar beets are raised in great abundance, but these are not the rule. The proportion of cattle, horses, sheep, and swine increases greatly compared with the number of inhabitants, but because of the relatively low density of the population, the number of animals in a given area is less than in western Europe. The care which the animals receive is much less than farther west. In fact lack of care is evident everywhere; the houses are smaller, less comfortable, and less neatly cared for; and there is much more tendency to leave things lying around at loose ends in the yards and outbuildings than in northern France.
These conditions arise in part from the fact that not only is the climate less healthful there than farther west, but summer droughts and crop failures join with the conditions of land tenure and govern ment in discouraging initiative. Indeed in the wheat region of south eastern Russia, from longitude eastward to the lower Volga, droughts frequently reduce the peasantry to destitution, and bring on the horrors of famines, like those of 1890, 1898, and the terrible days of 1921. In this dry, treeless land flat-roofed houses of adobe are com mon. Still farther to the southeast, near the Caspian Sea, the increas ing dryness gradually causes agriculture to give place to nomadic cattle raising except near the Caucasus Mountains where water is available.
In the Balkans, likewise, the proportion of animals compared with men increases enormously. Here, as in every other direction, the final result of the gradual modification of the climate is a tendency toward a full-fledged one-crop type of agriculture and then toward communi ties which rely rather than plants.
Southeastward, southward, and southwestward from northern France this tendency attains its full results only in the deserts of North Africa. In Europe a distance of a few hundred miles from northern France drives flax, sugar beets, and root forage almost out of the farmer's list of products. In southern France rye, oats, and barley are also scanty; but potatoes are still abundant, corn occupies an important place, vegetables and grapes are raised in profusion, and, olives attain importance. There and in the northern parts of Italy, and to a less extent in Spain, intensive agriculture is still the rule, and the farms are not only beautiful because so well cultivated, hut because of the variety of the crops and the abundance of trees. Horses and cattle, however, become less numerous except in the Po Valley; swine lose' much of their importance; while sheep and goats are not raised in any such numbers as farther south. Hence, northern Italy has few domestic ' animals. Farther south, as befits the dry climate, intensive agriculture continues in the well-watered portions such as the western parts of the peninsulas of Iberia, Italy and Greece, and in all other regions where irrigation is feasible. In such regions broad fields of a single crop are often replaced by areas where many kinds of trees grow intermingled with vines or separated by little patches of crops. This type of culti vation betokens less care than where each crop is treated separately, with due thought as to the best conditions of moisture, sun, and soil. Carried to an extreme it becomes the haphazard agriculture of the torrid zone where everything is left to chance.
In the drier parts of central and eastern Spain and Italy, and in most of the Balkan Peninsula full fledged one-crop agriculture again appears.
Winter wheat and barley are the staples, for they ripen early enough to escape the long summer drought which burns up every green thing that is not irrigated. Sheep, and in the Balkan Peninsula goats, become the chief animals, while in Spain, Greece, and the Balkan countries a certain number of the sheep-keepers become nomadic, at ,least during the summer. Thus here, as on the other borders of Europe, extreme conditions of climate put an end to intensive and highly varied farming, and lead to one-crop agriculture with its danger of famine and distress, and to cattle or sheep raising with its sparse population and its nomadic and unsocial tendencies.