Question

Please explain what "The Agricultural Revolution" is.

Answer 1

Despite the great gains in industry, agriculture remained the nation's basic occupation. The revolution in agriculture -- paralleling that in manufacturing after the Civil War -- involved a shift from hand labor to machine farming, and from subsistence to commercial agriculture. Between 1860 and 1910, the number of farms in the United States tripled, increasing from 2 million to 6 million, while the area farmed more than doubled from 160 million to 352 million hectares.

The Agricultural Revolution, the unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries, was linked to such new agricultural practices as crop rotation, selective breeding, and a more productive use of arable land.One of the most important innovations of the Agricultural Revolution was the development of the Norfolk four-course rotation, which greatly increased crop and livestock yields by improving soil fertility and reducing fallow. Crop rotation is the practice of growing a series of dissimilar types of crops in the same area in sequential seasons to help restore plant nutrients and mitigate the build-up of pathogens and pests that often occurs when one plant species is continuously cropped.Following a two-field crop rotation system common in the Middle Ages and a three-year three field crop rotation routine employed later, the regular planting of legumes such as peas and beans in the fields that were previously fallow became central and slowly restored the fertility of some croplands. In the end, it was the farmers in Flanders (in parts of France and current day Belgium) that discovered a still more effective four-field crop rotation system, using turnips and clover (a legume) as forage crops to replace the three-year crop rotation fallow year.