The Commons Before the Combine: A Short History of Farmers Working Together

Ask most people when farmers started cooperating and they will picture the grain co-op down the road, or a barn raising in a period drama: something quaint, something that grew up alongside the tractor and the telephone. The real answer is older than writing. For most of the roughly nine thousand years since people first settled down to grow food, cooperation was not a value farmers held. It was the machinery. A shared irrigation channel, a shared plough team, a shared calendar for who grazes which pasture and when: none of it worked without a standing agreement among neighbours about who did what, when, and what happened if someone broke the rule. Take the agreement away and the technology stops functioning, not because anyone lacked the tools, but because nobody had a way to run them past the scale of a single household.

That is the argument of this piece, and the reason it matters now. Proprietary agtech and farm data platforms are not applying a new logic to farming. They are removing a very old one.

Cooperation Had to Be Invented Before Farming Could Work

At Mureybet and Abu Hureyra, two of the earliest farming settlements in what is now Syria, archaeologists have found large buildings with no hearths and no sleeping areas: structures built for meetings and shared ritual, not for living in. Burial practices and the size of individual dwellings from that period show no sign of anyone holding more status or property than their neighbours. Settling down to farm did not, by itself, invent hierarchy. What it required was something else: a group willing to organise itself collectively almost as soon as it stopped moving.

It is worth being precise about what kind of cooperation this was, because it was not unlimited generosity extended to whoever turned up. Hunter-gatherer bands had operated on loose, flexible sharing networks with open access to land and resources across wide, shifting territories. Settling down to farm meant narrowing that. A stored grain harvest and a planted field only make sense if a specific, bounded group agrees on who gets to use them, and is willing to defend that boundary. The first farming villages did not abandon cooperation. They gave it edges. That distinction, bounded and rule-governed rather than boundlessly generous, is the thread running through every example in this piece.

Reciprocity as Infrastructure in the Andes

Long before the Inca Empire existed, communities across the Andes built two related practices into the rhythm of the agricultural year. Ayni was reciprocal labour between households: if a family helped a neighbour plant or harvest, that labour was owed back, tracked informally but taken seriously, extended to house-building and other major undertakings as well as farming. Minga (sometimes minka) was collective labour for shared infrastructure that no single household could build alone: repairing an irrigation canal after a flood, constructing terracing on a steep slope, maintaining a shared road.

Both practices were rooted in the ayllu, a small, self-governing kinship community, not in any central authority. When the Inca state absorbed the Andes, it built its own labour tax on top of this tradition, the mita, a coercive and often brutal system that the Spanish later inherited and made worse. But ayni and minga themselves survived every regime that tried to claim them, because they never depended on the regime in the first place. Versions of both are still practised in rural Andean communities today.

A Thousand Years of Shared Water in Bali

In Bali, the word subak means cooperation, and it names both a farmer collective and the rice terrace irrigation system that collective manages. The earliest evidence for it dates to the ninth century. A subak coordinates water sharing among rice growers according to a shared ritual calendar tied to water temples and the goddess Dewi Danu, source of the irrigation lake, so that upstream and downstream farmers both get a fair share regardless of who happens to sit closer to the source. In villages such as Jatiluwih, the system has run in something close to its original form for over a thousand years. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage site not for its age alone, but because it still works: an operating irrigation cooperative that has outlasted every kingdom, colonial administration, and government that has claimed authority over the island since the ninth century.

The Tribunal That Still Meets Every Week

In Valencia, Spain, a body called the Tribunal de las Aguas has met in public, without lawyers, under the cathedral, for at least eight centuries, to resolve disputes over irrigation water among the farmers of the surrounding huerta. Nearby Murcia and Alicante run a related system called the tanda, a fixed rotation of time slots during which each farmer may draw water. Elinor Ostrom, the political economist who eventually won a Nobel Memorial Prize for showing that shared resources do not automatically collapse into a tragedy of the commons, used the Valencia tribunal as one of her central cases. What she found was not sentiment. It was clear boundaries, regular monitoring, graduated penalties for cheating, and a forum for resolving disputes that nobody, not the Church, not the Spanish state, not any single farmer, could unilaterally override. The tribunal has outlasted the Reconquista, the Spanish Empire, a civil war, and a dictatorship. Good governance, it turns out, is more durable than good intentions.

The Field Split Into a Thousand Strips

Across much of medieval Europe, the open-field system organised village land into two or three large shared fields, each divided into narrow strips worked by individual peasant households. A household’s strips were deliberately scattered across the field rather than consolidated in one block, spreading the risk that any single strip might fail to a bad patch of soil or an unlucky pest. Crop rotation across the fields, and common grazing on the fallow field once harvest was in, were agreed collectively by the manor’s residents, not set by any one household. Ploughing itself was often a shared undertaking: a full team of oxen was expensive enough that few households owned one outright, so teams, and the labour to drive them, were pooled. None of this reflected a preference for cooperation over independence. It reflected what the available technology actually cost, and what it took to make that technology work at village scale.

Higher in the Alps, a parallel system produced an even longer institutional record. In the Austrian Alps, documented farmer participation in managing shared pastures and forests goes back to the thirteenth century. Far from fading into folklore, this arrangement was formally recognised by the state in 1853 and has held the legal status of a public corporation, the Agrargemeinschaft, since 1950. These bodies still exist. Switzerland ran a close cousin of the same system, the Allmend, a third economic zone alongside private fields and farmsteads, governing shared pasture, forest, and water rights from the Middle Ages until nineteenth-century liberal land reform. My father’s farm in Carinthia sits inside exactly this tradition: Alpine grazing land that, in living memory and well before it, was never imagined as something one household could hold or manage alone.

Cooperation Was Not the Whole Story

None of this should be mistaken for a golden age. The same medieval countryside that ran open fields and Alpine commons also ran corvée, the unpaid labour peasants owed their lord as a condition of tenancy, extracted under threat rather than exchanged in kind. That was not cooperation. It was extraction with a feudal licence. Horizontal cooperation among peasants, sharing a plough team, agreeing a grazing rotation, sat underneath a vertical system that took a portion of everyone’s labour and handed it upward without consent. Both things were true of the same village in the same season. The commons that farmers built for themselves and the obligations that were built on top of them by someone else were never the same institution, and it does the history no favours to conflate them.

The Rupture

What ended the open-field system and the wider European commons was not obsolescence. It was enclosure: a centuries-long legal and administrative process of converting shared land into private property. In England, enclosure begins as early as the twelfth century and accelerates sharply between 1450 and 1640, as manorial lords convert arable strips into pasture for the more profitable wool trade. After 1700, Parliament formalised the process: owners holding three-quarters of an area’s land by value could petition to enclose the rest, common grazing rights and all. Between 1604 and 1914, more than 5,200 separate enclosure acts converted roughly 2.75 million hectares, close to a fifth of England’s total land area, from commons into private holdings. The Alpine version ran on a slower clock but the same logic: commons divisions, Allmendteilungen, are documented from the fifteenth century, growing more frequent through the sixteenth and seventeenth as the practice spread from the pre-Alpine zone into the grain-growing lowlands.

The pattern is worth naming plainly, because it recurs. A long-running commons is rarely destroyed by force in a single stroke. It is converted, acre by acre and generation by generation, through legal and administrative means, until the institution that once governed it collectively simply no longer exists to be governed.

Mutual Aid After the Land Was Already Private

Cooperation did not disappear once the land itself was enclosed. It moved down a level, from managing shared land to pooling scarce capital across farms that were now separately owned. In North America, the barn raising, neighbours gathering to erect a farmer’s barn frame in a single day, addressed a building problem no household could solve alone without hired labour it could not afford. The threshing ring did the same for machinery: at its peak between 1900 and 1920, a threshing ring called for each member farmer to supply one worker and a team for every sixteen hectares of grain awaiting harvest, sharing a single expensive threshing machine across an entire district rather than each household buying its own. Land was private. The tools and the labour to run them at scale were not. Cooperation had simply found the next place it was needed.

Where This Picks Up Again

The twentieth century formalised the same instinct into grain and dairy cooperatives, farmer-owned institutions built to give small producers the bargaining power that no single farm could hold alone against a buyer or a bank. That is where the familiar, comfortable version of this story usually starts, as though farmers only began cooperating once the balance sheet demanded it. This piece has tried to show that the balance sheet was never the beginning. It was the latest chapter in a much older habit: building shared rules for shared resources because the alternative, everyone managing land, water, and labour alone, never actually worked at the scale farming needed.

The next chapter in that habit is being written now, except the shared resource in question is not a paddock, a canal, or a threshing machine. It is data. The same question the huerta tribunal answered in the twelfth century and the subak answered in the ninth is being asked again: who gets to draw on a shared resource, on what terms, and who decides when someone has taken more than their share.

Part one of two. Next:

Sources

Neolithic origins

• Bowles, S. & Choi, J.K. (2019). The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution and the Origins of Private Property. Journal of Political Economy, 127(5). On communal ritual structures at Mureybet and Abu Hureyra, and the absence of hierarchy in early farming settlements.
• Environmental effects on the spread of the Neolithic (2005). arXiv:q-bio/0505013. On the narrowing of open-access hunter-gatherer sharing networks into bounded groups as a precondition for settled farming.

Andean reciprocity

• Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Reciprocity, Andean Style. On ayni as reciprocal household labour rooted in the ayllu.
• What is a Minga? What is the History of Mingas?. On minga/minka as collective infrastructure labour, and its survival through the Inca mita and Spanish colonisation.

Balinese subak

• International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, Subak Irrigation System in Bali.
• Arizona State University SES Library (2025), Balinese Subak Irrigation System.

Spanish huerta tribunals and Ostrom

• Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.
• How Irrigation Functioned in Eastern Spain: Reflections on Elinor Ostrom’s Work.

European open fields and Alpine commons

• Open-field system and Agriculture in the Middle Ages, Wikipedia.
• The History of Utilization and Management of Commons and Consequences of Current Social Change in the Alpine Region of Austria. ResearchGate. On the thirteenth-century origins of Austrian Alpine commons administration and the Agrargemeinschaft’s legal status.
• Territories of commons: a review of common land organizations and institutions in the European Alps. IOPscience.
• Common land in Switzerland, Wikipedia. On the Allmend as a third economic zone and its nineteenth-century liberal reform.

Enclosure

• Enclosure, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
• National Bureau of Economic Research (2022), Enclosure of Rural England Boosted Productivity and Inequality.

Mutual aid after enclosure

• Barn raising, Wikipedia.
• Steam Threshing Rings, Farm Collector.

• Agriculture History
• Commons
• Cooperatives
• Ostrom
• Enclosure
• Irrigation
• Alpine Commons
• Food Systems