Agriculture in Siberia was started many millennia ago by peoples indigenous to the region. While these native Siberians had little more than "digging sticks" called mattocks instead of ploughs at their disposal, Siberian agriculture would develop through the centuries until millions of Russian farmers were settled there, reaping significant bounties off this huge expanse of land stretching from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.
The effect of climate and geography on agriculture
Agriculture is inevitably tied up with climate, as Siberia's is not the most forgiving or lenient. Siberia does not get warmth from the Atlantic Ocean because of the barriers of Europe and the Ural Mountains, or from the warmer climes of Central Asia because of the mountains to its south and the mountains of the Russian Far East. Therefore, the only side of Siberia which is not blocked off by a geographical barrier is the north, opening up the area to the bitter cold of the Arctic Ocean. To add to these agricultural disadvantages, most of Siberia's soil is acidic podsol, which is not a good match for agriculture. However, there are rich, fertile black earth belts in the southwest (known as chernozem), as well as scattered pockets of rich land in other parts of southern Siberia. Despite the many drawbacks for cultivating Siberia lands, there exists a multitude of rivers and lakes that can be put to use for irrigation.
In terms of geographical location, there are two main agricultural centers in the fertile areas of Western Siberia, one being near the Urals in the Tobolsky District and the other located on the upper Ob River around the city of Tomsk. Despite the much more favorable conditions that prevail in these western parts, there do exist, however, pockets of suitable farming lands to the east. All of these combined areas were fertile enough, in fact, to necessitate the "Siberian tariff" of 1897, which was an increased rate on transport of butter and grain by rail to European Russia. This measure, which lasted until 1913, was enacted in order to protect European Russian farmers from the very cheap Siberian agricultural goods flooding in from the newly built Trans-Siberian Railway (which had decreased the price of shipping from Siberia by 5-6 times). Therefore, while the climate and geography posed difficulties for the Siberian farmer, there was still agricultural success to be had in the region.
Pre-modern beginnings
The Neolithic period (8,000-7,000 BCE) is often taken to signify the start of land cultivation. However, the native peoples living in Siberia at that moment in history did not join in this global movement because of the difficulties associated with its severe climate. Agricultural stirrings did reach Siberia by the second half of the 3rd millennium, when the peoples of the Afanasevo culture of southern Siberia (located, more specifically, in the southern reaches of the Ob River), started to practice agronomy. It was a slow start, however, as these peoples had very rudimentary cultivation skills. They used digging sticks (the previously mentioned mattocks) as their main farming tool, and they were not able to subsist solely on this practice and turned as well toward hunting, gathering, and the domestication of sheep, cows, and horses.
Only during the Bronze Age, with the advent of bronze scythes, were Siberians able to reach the same agricultural level as had already been achieved in many other areas of the world. This occurred with the rise of the Andronovo culture that inhabited the area between the Tobol River and the Minusinsk Basin. These peoples were sedentary wheat farmers who engaged in barter with the Chinese people to the southeast of their lands, along the periphery of what was to later become Siberia.
Siberian agriculture made even more headway during the Tagar culture of the 7th to 2nd centuries BCE, whose peoples lived in the Minusinsk Basin in the upper part of the Yenisei River and introduced the practice of irrigation to the region, signifying a major step forward in terms of increased output from agricultural pursuits.
The plough was finally adopted during the first independent Siberian state, the Kirghiz Khanate. This state arose during the 8th century AD, also along the Yenisei River, but adopted a larger range than the Tagar culture, stretching from Krasnoyarsk in the north to the Sayan Mountains in the south. While the economy of the peoples living in this area was based on nomadic cattle breeding, they also engaged in arable farming. The chief crops cultivated during this time included millet, barley, wheat, and hemp.
Early Russian settlers in Siberia
The first step to opening up Siberia for Russian settlement and colonization came as early as 1558, when the wealthy landowner Grigory Dmitriyevich Stroganov received a charter from tsar Ivan the Terrible that gave him the right to colonize the "empty lands" beyond the Urals (that were already inhabited by the native tribes of Siberia). He was given the right to bring in settlers to these areas and plough their lands.
This colonization through land expropriation happened largely in gradual west-to-east steps, aided by the many rivers and river valleys that flow through Siberia. Russian settlers started in the westernmost valleys of the Tura, Tobol, Irtysh, and Ob rivers, and marched onwards to the Ket, Yenisei, Angara, Ilim, Lena, Shilka, Argun, and Amur rivers. Beginning in the 1620s, the area around Yeniseysk in Central Siberia was introduced to cultivation, as were the lands adjacent to Krasnoyarsk in the 1630s. The soil of the latter area was more attractive to settlers because of it was made of rich, black-earth (chernozem), much more conducive to farming than the other poor Siberian soil types. A few decades later, the Upper Lena and Upper Angara River Basins became the site for agriculture, mainly rye, oats, and barley. These areas were more remote and did not have the fertile earth that Krasnoyarsk laid claim to, but food production was crucially needed as more and more settlers started to flow into Siberia.
By the late 1600s, Russian settlers started making the long trek to Siberia in greater numbers in order to find new opportunities and lands to claim, away from the densely populated tracts of European Russia. In fact, some peasants chose to move away from their western homes because of poor soil conditions in their native regions, hoping to settle down on some of the chernozem soil that Siberia had to offer. Families also had the chance to improve their standing in society and escape poverty by taking advantage of the more lenient taxing system the Tsar offered in Siberia; for each acre of land that a family tilled for the tsar, they were given permission to plough five acres of government land for their own benefit. In addition to this, early settlers enjoyed a 10-year tax exemption, an incentive for families to migrate eastward.
These settlers brought many of their traditional Russian crops with them. The most important of these crops was rye, but they also brought other grains such as barley, wheat, buckwheat, and millet along with vegetables like peas, cabbage, turnips, carrots, onions, and garlic. Like the natives of the Kirghiz Khanate before them, all this Russian crop cultivation was done by plough.
The climate of Siberia is not conducive for agriculture, but Siberia during this time was in fact slowly becoming self-reliant. The Siberian Office was therefore gradually able to reduce the amount of food imported to Siberia from European Russia. This was great news for the Russian Imperial government, seeing as the price of shipping such staples as grain those enormous distances was both exorbitantly expensive and slow.
As the wave of Russian settlement crept ever eastward, agricultural success became less and less guaranteed. By the 1730s, this east-west journey had finally reached the Kamchatka Peninsula. The aim was to pursue agriculture just as previous settlers had done in the west, but the climate of this peninsula is extremely inhospitable and these pursuits were unsuccessful. However, there were scattered pockets which could produce grain in the eastern regions of Siberia, like Irkutsk, which grew to be one of the most influential cities east of the Urals. In contrast with other east Siberian cities, Irkutsk residents never experienced periods of hunger and did not have to rely on shipments of grain from the west to survive.
Fur vs. agriculture
During this agricultural progression from east to west, settlers did not encounter the empty lands that Tsar Ivan the Terrible and Grigori Stroganov had been expecting. There were already Russian tracks on the land, marks of the indefatigable fur trade of the 1600s. Sable, Marten, and Fox pelts were harvested by the thousands, while squirrel pelt numbers reached even more tremendous numbers. Fur, in some ways, paved the way for Russia's modernization: furs (or "soft gold", as it was also called) were used as gifts for foreign ambassadors, paid for the expenses of the Tsar's court, and kept his government running smoothly. Furs helped finance the militarization of the Russian Empire, helping to win back lands from the Poles and the Swedes and funding the monstrous engine of expansion and modernization that was Peter the Great's main mission during his rule.
Because profits from the fur trade so fed the Russian machine during this time, it is perhaps no wonder that the Tsar wanted to preserve some lands for hunting purposes rather than for agricultural pursuits. In fact, in 1683, the Siberian Office sent to Yakutsk's governors a proclamation that stated there was to be: "a firm prohibition on pain of death that henceforth in sable hunting grounds no forest whatever [was] to be cut or burned, in order that the animals be not exterminated nor flee to distant parts".
As the animals were quickly hunted out of their traditional territory and the fur frontier was pushed evermore to the east, however, the fur trade dwindled and the scale tipped in favor of agriculture. The most resounding win for Siberian agriculture came in 1822, with the reforms of Mikhail Speransky. Whereas before, the native nomads of Siberia had been considered as such, they were now relegated to an artificial "settled" category and put on the same level as Russian settlers. This had two main implications for the region: Siberian natives were kept in conditions of destitution because of the increase in tax burden they were forced to face and large sections of land were freed up for cultivation.
With the influx of Russian peasants into areas that had traditionally been used as pastureland and hunting grounds, many natives decided to abandon their old ways of subsistence and fit themselves into the categories that the government had decreed for them. However, Russian settlers started the habit of seizing native lands if they were especially fertile or lay in advantageous locations. The method for claiming lands was as simple as taking them by force from the Siberian natives, which was a practice that came to be legalized by an official decree in 1879. This could take many forms, one of which being that Russian settlers sometimes simply ploughed up the land around a native family's yurt, forcing them to move. Through similar processes occurring all throughout Siberia, the fur business slowly transitioned to agriculture.
Pre-1917 agricultural growth