DIRECT FARMER’S LEASE. — This is a subspecies of the broader form of leasing rural estates, in which the tenant, as a small agricultural entrepreneur, directly undertakes cultivation of the estate, relying predominantly on his own labor or that of members of his family.
Under this form of management, the landed proprietor remains extraneous to the entire production cycle, the management of which passes to the tenant, limiting himself to receiving an annual rent, in money and in kind. For his part, upon assuming management of the estate, the tenant undertakes to cultivate it in accordance with the rules of sound agricultural practice.
The live and dead stock necessary for operation generally belongs to the tenant. If, instead, it is owned, wholly or partly, by the owner of the estate, the tenant assumes the risks upon delivery and undertakes to return it at the expiry of the contract in the same kind, quality, number, and weight, upon payment of a non-interest-bearing security deposit.
The forms of d. f.’s l., more or less developed and more or less favorable to the worker, established in legislation, provincial standard contracts, or custom, constitute an infinite range, varying according to the diversity of agricultural zones, the economic and financial possibilities of the rural classes, soil fertility, the land-tenure system, and local traditions.
The small d. f.’s l., in its most developed form, known as autonomous or family-based, which presupposes a farm organized into separate holdings, has spread particularly in the Veneto and Campania, as well as in other hilly areas where the fragmentation of property and the poverty of the soil have led to the spread of this type of agricultural contract in place of the centuries-old institution of sharecropping. In the area, however, where the particular landholding arrangement is unsuitable for the creation of separate farms, the lease contract loses its characteristic family-based character, taking the form of a non-autonomous and particular small lease.
From the leases of large estates and industrialized cultivation in Lombardy, to the mixed lease-and-sharecropping arrangements of certain Venetian and Piedmontese provinces, to the near-sharecropping system of Trentino (woodland and arable land under sharecropping, livestock and pasture under lease), there is an entire interweaving of relations between the landowner and the worker, not always easily classifiable.
In any case, in every area one may observe a clear tendency toward gradual evolution into the more perfect form of the autonomous lease, in relation to the improved financial conditions of the rural classes, the need for clarity and precision in agreements, and the changed technical and economic requirements of agriculture and the market, which sooner or later cannot fail to influence the definitive organization of legal relations in agriculture.
The social issue concerning d. f.’s l. is above all a problem of better protection for agricultural labor in an intermediate form of management that should constitute a stage in the worker’s ascent toward acquiring ownership of the land. The need for adequate measures in this area is felt especially in connection with the necessity of controlling rents, particularly in areas with denser agricultural populations, where the supply of land is not proportionate to demand.
The issue here is to ensure the small tenant fair remuneration for his labor in relation to his family needs, since, in the profits of the small enterprise, after the amount of the rent has been deducted, what remains represents the income from the manual labor contributed by the farming family.
Appropriate tax and credit facilities should assist the tenant in acquiring ownership not only of the agricultural capital but also of the land, for which the draft agricultural-contract legislation provides the tenant with a right of pre-emption and preference, on equal terms, in the event of the sale of the estate. Such measures are not unknown in other foreign legal systems.
The problem must therefore find its solution within the framework of a new political and social orientation inspired by Christian morality, which fully includes the almost patriarchal conception of the rural family, understood not only as a “community for the consumption of goods, but also and particularly as a community of production” (Pius XII, Words to Farmers), where, in unity of interests and purposes, the purest and most sacred affections are cemented beneath the shelter of the domestic hearth.
Economic and social considerations also counsel ensuring the small tenant a certain stability on the estate, in order to attach him more firmly to his work and to the land, through a contract of several years’ duration. The legislation of many foreign countries, whose agricultural conditions are not very dissimilar from ours, has been moving in this direction. See, for example, the Dutch law of 12 November 1941 and the Spanish law of 21 June 1940. Public-law control over annual evictions is practiced instead in England (the Agricultural Holdings Act of 1925): this system favors the best and most capable workers, gradually eliminating the inept and dishonest.
The areas where the need to adopt all these measures is most urgent and keenly felt are naturally the latifundia regions of southern Italy, where the worker’s position is made more uncertain and difficult by the existence of the large intermediary tenant and gebellotto; where plots of land are divided into modest parcels, often insufficient to provide the means of livelihood and work for a family unit; where the creation of separate farms is virtually unknown; and where the Sicilian terracinato or Calabrian terracirista is forced to make long and arduous journeys every day to reach his work, owing to the lack of rural buildings in the countryside and of all those public works (electrical and hydraulic installations, roads, bridges, etc.) indispensable to human existence.
Despite the manifest favor enjoyed by d. f.’s l. among social reformers, on account of the both technical and economic autonomy that it grants the worker, it is nevertheless evident that this form of management cannot be extended beyond certain limits, encountering almost insurmountable obstacles wherever the size of the enterprise and the industrial type of cultivation require that deployment of energy and technical and administrative expertise, as well as that influx of capital, which are generally lacking among our rural classes. These are areas or agricultural enterprises where other forms of managing the agricultural undertaking—not least sharecropping and large-scale leasing—still have an important social function to perform, which explains their very existence within the current legal and economic order.