Investment Advice

You probably haven't gone into mining just for the fun of it, or even just for the common good. Probably, you intended to get rich. Agricola provides some sage advice for how to do that without risking too much of your own capital.

First, he notes that there are some ways of mining that can be done without any capital outlay at all - he's talking about panning gold or tin ore from river beds, or something called trench prospecting. But if you want to explore deeper into the earth, there gets to be more and more risk that you will spend a lot of money and time getting rights to land and digging a big hole, only to find that there's nothing there.

Xenophon advocated having each of ten tribes go digging with the understanding that they would share whatever was found. You'd probably hit some sort of metal deposit in four tries out of the ten. By Agricola's time society had become too complex for that. Mining was more likely either a State enterprise, or undertaken by a private individual with money to invest. But share purchase arrangements also existed, and Agricola provides suggestions for getting the most out of these.

He recommends that one purchase a mixture of high-priced and low-priced shares. These would represent mines that are already productive (the high priced ones), and mines that are not yet productive (unknowns, thus lower priced shares). Some people buy low, then sell at the first sign of an increase, but Agricola recommends that you hold your shares. Many mines are productive for a long time, and they can be valuable even when apparently used-up.

The mining art is complex, and no one understands all of it. So, a successful mine owner needs to delegate, and also needs to know what's going on by living there or at least in the neighborhood, and visiting often.