AP Human Geography 5.4: The Second Agricultural Revolution

The second agricultural revolution began in Western Europe in the 1700s and spread through Europe and to North America in the 1800s. Its new technology made each field, and each farm worker, produce more food.

• Crop rotation with turnips and clover. Under the older three-field system, one field in three lay fallow, left unplanted for a year so its soil could recover. A four-field rotation planted that field with turnips or clover instead. Clover puts nitrogen back into the soil, and both crops feed livestock, so no field sat idle. The picture at the top of the page shows the change.
• The seed drill planted seeds in straight rows at an even depth instead of scattering them by hand, so less seed was wasted and more of it sprouted.
• Iron and later steel plows turned heavy soil faster, with fewer animals pulling.
• Selective breeding of livestock, mating the largest and healthiest animals, gave heavier cattle and sheep.
• Machines such as the horse-drawn mechanical reaper and the threshing machine, built in the new factories, cut grain and separated it from the straw with far fewer hands.

Enclosure joined each village's scattered open-field strips into single fenced or hedged farms, which made the new methods easier to use.

With these advances, food production rose: the same land, with fewer workers, grew far more. Turnips and clover fed cattle and sheep through the winter, when farmers had once slaughtered many animals each fall for lack of feed, so meat, milk and cheese reached more people's meals all year. Potatoes, which had arrived from the Americas, added cheap, filling food. Canals and then railroads carried grain and meat from farms to growing cities.

More food, and more kinds of it, meant better diets. People who eat enough, with more protein, resist disease better, and fewer of their children die young. Better diets were one cause of falling death rates, alongside cleaner water and, later, medicine. Death rates fell, and life expectancy, the average number of years a newborn can expect to live, rose. Birth rates stayed high for a time, so populations grew quickly.

The chain runs in one direction: new technology, then more food, then better diets, then fewer early deaths and longer life expectancy. Leave out a link and the explanation has a gap.

When each farm worker grows more food, a country needs fewer farm workers to feed everyone. Machines and enclosure cut farm jobs further. Many rural people, no longer needed on the land, moved to towns and cities, where the new factories of the Industrial Revolution needed workers. The two revolutions fed each other: factories built the plows, reapers and threshers that farms bought, and farms fed the factory workers.

A count shows the size of the change. Everyone eats, farmers included, so the farm workforce a country needs is its population divided by the number of people one farm worker can feed. In hypothetical Country P, with 1,000,000 people, workers who each feed 4 people means 1,000,000 ÷ 4 = 250,000 farm workers. Once each worker feeds 8 people, it needs 1,000,000 ÷ 8 = 125,000, and the other 125,000 are free for other work, much of it in factories.

A landscape records the revolution, and so do paintings, maps and records of it. When you compare two visual sources, such as views of one village before and after its farms changed, name a feature that changed, then say what the change shows.

• Narrow open-field strips becoming larger hedged fields shows enclosure.
• A fallow field disappearing, with turnips and clover in its place, shows the new rotation.
• Fewer people at work in the fields, with a machine among them, shows labor being freed.
• A factory town growing nearby shows where that labor could go.

One feature is a clue; two or three that point the same way make a conclusion. Say which features you compared, in which source, before you say what they show.