5.4 The Second Agricultural Revolution

The Second Agricultural Revolution started in Britain in the 1700s and spread to Western Europe and North America during the 1800s and early 1900s. It ran side by side with the Industrial Revolution (7.1), and each helped the other: factories made new farm tools and machines, and farms produced the food and the workers that growing industrial cities needed.

• Better crop rotation: the Norfolk four-course system rotated wheat, turnips, barley and clover. Clover adds nitrogen to the soil, and turnips and clover fed livestock over winter, so fields no longer had to sit empty (fallow) to recover.
• Enclosure: open fields and common grazing land were fenced into private farms, mostly through acts of Parliament between about 1750 and 1850. Larger, consolidated farms were easier to improve, but many small farmers and laborers lost access to land.
• New tools: Jethro Tull's seed drill (early 1700s) planted seeds in neat rows at the right depth. In the United States, Cyrus McCormick's mechanical reaper (1830s) and John Deere's steel plow (1837) let one farmer work far more land.
• Power and machines: steam engines and later gasoline tractors (early 1900s) replaced much of the work done by people and horses.
• Transportation: railroads, and later refrigerated rail cars, carried crops and meat to distant cities, so farmers could specialize and sell farther away.
• Science: early chemical fertilizers and selective breeding of animals raised output further.

The biggest effect was that fewer farmers could feed more people. Food supplies grew, diets improved, people lived longer and populations rose, which shows up in stage 2 of the demographic transition model (2.5).

Because farms needed fewer workers, and enclosure pushed many off the land, millions moved from the countryside to cities. This rural-to-urban migration supplied the labor for factories. In the United States, about half of all workers farmed in the 1870s; today fewer than 2 in 100 do.

Farming also became more commercial. Farmers increasingly grew crops to sell rather than to feed their own families, borrowed money for machinery, and depended on markets, prices and railroads. This set the stage for the large-scale commercial farming of the 1900s (5.7).

At the global scale, the Second Agricultural Revolution mostly happened in industrializing countries. Much of Africa, Asia and Latin America didn't get these changes at the same time, and many colonies were pushed instead to grow plantation crops for European markets. That uneven timing is one root of the development gaps you'll study in Unit 7.