[mandevil]

TFA talked about the difficulty of division, and waved at the idea that farming was different from pastoral societies because of the ease of division: farming land is more valuable as it is concentrated (because of the well known dangers of having many very small plots that are difficult to work and improve) but a herd (or fishing tools) can be split and merged far more easily. So agriculture drives to unigenture.

A blog post like this is mostly hand-waving at complex ideas, but that was her argument for it.

[bell-cot]

Based both on family history (farmers both sides) and experts such as https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... - I have grave doubts as to the downsides of having many small plots of land in early agricultural conditions. The critical issue is having enough total land (measured by productivity) to feed your family in bad years.

And whatever nice-sounding things TFA might suggest about diving a herd, it's obvious that 8 cattle are worth 4X as much as 2 cattle. And any "leave 1/4 of my herd to each of my 4 children" division will result in a 4X downgrade to the next generation's standard of living.

(Oh, yeah - the TFA has plenty of optimistic hand-waving.)