Three and a half million hectares of land in a single parliamentary vote – that was the weight of 16 September 1920 in the Latvian countryside. The Constitutional Assembly adopted Part I of the Agrarian Reform Law, “State Land Fund”, creating a land fund for new farms, expansion of smallholdings, and public needs. It included 8,557 economic units, among them 1,479 manors, totaling about 3.4 million hectares, or 52 percent of Latvia’s total land area.

The agrarian reform was one of the new Latvian state’s first major social and economic undertakings after the War of Independence. It transformed the manor-based land ownership system, gave land to landless peasants and smallholders, and turned much of the countryside into a landscape of new farms.