Extensive, low productivity agriculture, and extensive, and so wasteful, use of land is always an indication of an inadequate development of capitalism, not an over-development of capitalism. Capitalist development means more intensive agriculture/primary production. More productive crops are introduced, land fertility is raised, livestock is improved and so on. And, with primary production the same is seen. Independent producers would abandon coal mines that those operated by capital would not, because the latter can use machines and so on, and so go deeper to extract coal from lower seams, using steam engines to pump out water etc. New technologies enable oil and gas to be extracted from fields where previously it would not have been profitable and so on.
“Let us merely note two points. Firstly, technical progress is evoked by commodity economy”. (p 473)
But, this technical progress depends upon the commodity producer being able to introduce such improvement, i.e. it depends on them having access to capital, and the more capital they can access the greater the technical improvement they can introduce. Postnikov had shown – Peasant Farming In South Russia – that the introduction of machines had doubled the working area of the peasant household from 10-20 dessiatines. In other words, it was driving out direct production in favour of commodity production, and driving out the small and inefficient peasant producers. Danielson seeks to refute Postnikov's argument in an absurd way. He says that further development of technique would mean that today's 60 dessiatine farm would tomorrow have to be turned into a 300 dessiatine farm. His intention was to argue that the exiting size of farm was no indication of its capitalist nature.
“Such an argument against the thesis of our agriculture being bourgeois is as ridiculous as somebody setting out to prove the weakness and impotence of factory capitalism on the grounds that the steam-engine of today will have to be replaced “tomorrow” by the electric motor.” (p 474)
Lenin then examines the process by which extensive agriculture becomes transformed into intensive agriculture. Marx describes the way capitalist industry, which develops first in the towns, from the 15th century onwards, places increasing demands on existing agriculture and primary production. At first, it is peasant farmers that have to meet the demands of industry for raw and auxiliary materials, and food for workers. The same peasant producers also often have pits dug on their land from which they extract coal or clay and other materials. Prior to the use of coal, it's non-capitalist producers that provide the wood burned as fuel. But, eventually, the demands of capitalist industry become too much for these pre-capitalist forms of agriculture and primary production. In the meantime, the existing producers of agricultural products and primary products exhaust and destroy the fertility of the land. Industrial capital, dependent on a stable and long-term supply must then itself intervene in agriculture and primary production.
“It is in the nature of capitalist production that it develops industry more rapidly than agriculture. This is not due to the nature of the land, but to the fact that, in order to be exploited really in accordance with its nature, land requires different social relations. Capitalist production turns towards the land only after its influence has exhausted it and after it has devastated its natural qualities. An additional factor is that, as a consequence of landownership, agricultural products are expensive compared with other commodities, because they are sold at their value and are not reduced to their cost-price. They form, however, the principal constituent of the necessaries.”
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