seed measures of arable land

See also: work measures of arable land

Imagine that you own a suburban home, and a friend asks, “How big is your front lawn?” If you replied, “About five pounds of grass seed,” and your friend tends a similar lawn, he or she would have a pretty good idea of how big your lawn was.

In the Bible, Leviticus XXVII specifies that land should be “estimated according to the seed thereof, an homer of barley seed shall be valued at 50 shekels of silver.” It is not the barley seed that is worth 50 silver shekels (a lot of money), but the “homer of barley seed,” namely the amount of land that would be sown with 1 chomer of barley seed.

Seed measures of land area often have the same name as the unit of capacity used for the seed.  With no exception I know of, they were applied only to land on which grain was grown, and not for land used for vegetables or other crops.

As farmers became more accustomed to geometric land area units, many seed measures of land acquired geometric definitions – as so-and-so many square meters or square yards.

Seed measures of land are not stupid. In fact, they have several advantages over geometric units:

• They are readily understood by farmers, even a farmer who does not have the concepts of land measurement a surveyor does.
• They adjust automatically to the quality of the land. Seed is sown less densely on poor land than it is on fertile land, so a seed-based unit is a larger area on poor land than on good land. Thus it is fairer to fix taxes on farmers by a seed-measure of land than by a geometrical unit like the hectare, and so also for rents, land grants, and inheritances.

Other examples include the moggio, setier

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Last revised: 8 May 2001.