Capital may be fixed in the land, incorporated in it either in a transitory
 manner, as through improvements of a chemical nature, fertilisation, etc., or
 more permanently, as in drainage canals, irrigation works, leveling, farm
 buildings, etc. Elsewhere I have called the capital thus applied to land la
 terre-capital.[28]
 It belongs to the category of fixed capital. The interest on capital
 incorporated in the land and the improvements thus made in it as an instrument
 of production can constitute a part of the rent paid by the capitalist farmer
 to the landowner, [29]
 but it does not constitute the actual ground-rent, which is paid for the use of
 the land as such — be it in a natural or cultivated state. In a
 systematic treatment of landed property, which is not within our scope, this
 part of the landowner's revenue would have to be discussed at length. But a few
 words about it will suffice here. The more transitory capital investments,
 which accompany the ordinary production processes in agriculture, are all made
 without exception by the capitalist farmer. These investments, like cultivation
 proper in general, improve the land,[30] increase its output, and transform the land from
 mere material into land-capital when the cultivation is carried on more or less
 rationally, i.e., when it is not reduced to a brutal spoliation of the soil, as
 was in vogue, e.g., among the former slave-holders in the United States;
 however, the gentlemen landowners secure themselves against such practice by
 contract. A cultivated field is worth more than an uncultivated one of the same
 natural quality. The more permanent fixed capital investments, which are
 incorporated in the soil and used up in a longer period of time, are also in
 the main, and in some spheres often exclusively, made by the capitalist farmer.
 But as soon as the time stipulated by contract has expired — and this is
 one of the reasons why with the development of capitalist production the
 landowners seek to shorten the contract period as much as possible — the
 improvements incorporated in the soil become the property of the landowner as
 an inseparable feature of the substance, the land. In the new contract made by
 the landowner he adds the interest for capital incorporated in the land to the
 ground-rent itself. And he does this whether he now leases the land to the
 capitalist farmer who made these improvements or to some other farmer. His rent
 is thus inflated; and should he wish to sell his land (we shall see immediately
 how its price is determined), its value is now higher. He sells not merely the
 land but the improved land, the capital incorporated in the land for which he
 paid nothing. Quite aside from the movements of ground-rent itself, here lies
 one of the secrets of the increasing enrichment of landowners, the continuous
 inflation of their rents, and the constantly growing money-value of their
 estates along with progress in economic development. Thus they pocket a product
 of social development created without their help — fruges consumere
 nati. [Horace, Epistles, Book I, Epistles 2, 27. —
 Ed]. But this is at the same time one of the greatest obstacles to a
 rational development of agriculture, for the tenant farmer avoids all
 improvements and outlays for which he cannot expect complete returns during the
 term of his lease. We find this situation denounced as such an obstacle again
 and again, not only in the 18th century by James Anderson, the actual
 discoverer of the modern theory of rent [On J. Anderson's theory of rent see K.
 Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert (K. Marx/F. Engels, Werke,
 Band 26, 2. Teil, S. 103-05, 110-14, 134-39). — Ed.] — who
 was also a practical capitalist farmer and an advanced agronomist for his time
 — but also in our own day by opponents of the present constitution of
 landed property in England.