What is the 2nd agricultural revolution?
The 2nd agricultural revolution, was a great increase in food productivity that broke the food scarcity cycles that defined a stage 1 society. The Dutch are responsible for starting the revolution, and the British are responsible for taking a hold of the revolution. The 2nd agricultural revolution was more of an evolution occurring from the late 1600s all the way up to the end of the 1800s. New ideas such as, selective breeding, crop rotation, using fertilizer, and land reclamation made farming more efficient and intensive. Farmers replaced crops with low yields such as rye, with high yielding crops, such as the cereal grains of wheat and barley. New technologies invented in the industrial revolution allowed farmers to do more with less people. Machines started to replace workers, making farms more efficient at producing food. Farms that use to be communal, started to privatize, and people moved away from substance agriculture. With the money farmers were now making they started to put up fences and enclosed what was once shared farmland. The government started to reallocate land, helping the wealthy farmers get more land and make more money, and leaving less powerful tenant farmers with little or no land. The reallocation of the land made some farms bigger which in turn made them more efficient, since the farmers had more fields to do crop rotation on. Big farms could produce more than little ones could.