Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/311/en

Out of the consciousness-force of the Christianized intellectual soul or mind soul, the elements of pre-Christian agriculture are lifted to a higher level of culture. They enter, in the village organism or the individual farm, into a mutually furthering reciprocal relationship. Most visibly, this concerns the once-primordial opposition of arable farming and animal husbandry. The domestic animals are attuned in kind and number to the available fodder base. They furnish the manure which, together with the three-field crop rotation — winter crop, spring-sown crop and fallow — supported by the turning plough-working, provides for the enduring soil-born fertility. Everything stands, in space and time, in a reciprocal relationship to everything else: on the rotation member of the fallow — which signifies a year of rest for the soil — there grows, after a pass of the harrow in spring, a wild growth of herbs, grasses, clover, and so forth, which is grazed down over the summer by sheep and cattle and manured in the process. This arable pasture receives, before the ploughing-in and the sowing of the winter crop in autumn, additional manure from the stall-keeping of the preceding autumn-winter period. In the second year stand the winter cereals as bread-grain, which at the same time furnish principally the straw for the bedding litter in the stall; and, in the third year, stand as "exhausting crops" the spring-sown cereals as well as legumes, flax, linseed, and so forth. The arable land as a whole is divided into roughly three equal areas, on which the crops stand alongside one another, each being cultivated in turn on one of the three portions at intervals of three years (Figure 2). The three-field system was, right into the modern era, the guarantor of a soil fertility renewing itself from year to year, transcending the mere level of nature. The meadows, which furnished the hay for winter feeding in the stall and through which dung for the arable land came into being, were called "the mother of the arable land."