> Farm efficiency has increased incredibly in the last 200 years. People tend to forget that in 1850, a huge proportion of the population were farmers. I was w

> Farm efficiency has increased incredibly in the last 200 years. People tend to forget that in 1850, a huge proportion of the population were farmers. I was wondering if there might have been some specific "invention", unique to that era, triggering a spike in general farm efficiency, and I think I might have found it [0]. Around 1800 should have been the time where European agriculture became kinda "industrialized", with people putting some actual scientific effort into figuring out what makes crops grow and in what order to best grow them. > And this is happening today. A friend of mine is from a large farm family in southern Kentucky. Grain prices are getting so low because of high yields that even with the best technology on hand they can barely make a profit. I wonder how much of that problem is due to, by now, unrealistic "profit expectations", for industrialized agriculture? Heck, as idealistic as it may sound, maybe the problem is that we expect to make "money" of something as essential as food in the very first place? Could farmers be self-sustainable, if they didn't have to worry about scaling up to support "commercial interests"? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fertilizer#Key_figures_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fertilizer#Key_figu...