Agricultural specialisation and the land market: an examination of the dynamics of the relationship in the Swiss Alps, c.1860–1930

Abstract

From the latter half of the nineteenth century, mixed farming in the Alpine regions of Switzerland underwent a gradual process of specialisation. Cereal crops were phased out in favour of feed crops, livestock, viticulture and fruit farming. This article analyses the way in which the land market was affected by this increasingly specialised primary sector and asks whether this market became more efficient as a result of reduced transaction costs. Surveys have shown that the land market remained bound by the inertia inherent in the nature of landed property in the Alpine area. The connection between agricultural diversification and the land market appears to have been only partial and this suggests that the modernisation of farming did not so much alter the main balance of the market itself, as boost the circulation of plots more directly associated with the process of specialisation.