Agriculture

The Second Agricultural Revolution, which occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe alongside the Industrial Revolution, included all these things. Improved crop rotation systems, the increased use of machinery in agriculture, and Jethro Tull's horse-drawn seed drill contributed to greatly increased food production.

The Neolithic Revolution and First Agricultural Revolution are the same event. They refer to the ancient beginnings of agriculture, an event that made it possible for formerly nomadic tribes to create permanent settlements.

The Green Revolution is more recent (1970's) and includes the use of genetically-modified crops.

The Bolshevik Revolution was the Communist Revolution in Russia that overthrew the Czar in 1917.

The flying shuttle was developed by John Kay in the 1730s and quickly revolutionized the textile industry in Britain. Along with the spinning jenny and the water frame, the flying shuttle encouraged the budding industrial revolution and gave extra life to cottage industry, as textiles became immensely cheaper and quicker to produce.

Prior to the signing of the various enclosure acts, much of British farming was done on a very small scale. Most farming was merely subsistence farming, done to support the family with a small amount left over as surplus. The land was generally commonly owned, or rather, was organized in an open field system in which land was divided into small patches worked by peasants. Enclosure Acts made this land private and led to the rise of large-scale agricultural production. This had numerous consequences for British society. It led to a massive surge in agricultural production and a decline in the number of people needed to work the fields to feed the population. This in turn caused many farmers to move either to the colonies (providing the raw manpower for British colonialism) or to move to cities (providing the raw manpower for the Industrial Revolution).

During the Agricultural Revolution, the population of England more than doubled. The Agricultural Revolution meant that fewer workers could produce a greater surplus of food. A much higher population could be supported by a smaller number of workers than ever before. Many of the displaced rural population moved to cities providing the raw human manpower to spur the Industrial Revolution.

The Norfolk four-course system was an important part of the British Agricultural Revolution of the eighteenth century. It was a crop rotation system designed to grow different crops in the same soil at different times of the year. It generally involved a rotation of wheat, turnips, barley, and clover. The advantages were numerous: it allowed farmers to make a much healthier profit, it allowed livestock to be kept and fed year-round, it kept the soil fertile, and it provided greater protection against blights.

To let a field "lie fallow” means to leave it unsown and uncultivated for a period of time so as to restore the soil's fertility and ensure that the nutrients in the soil can be replenished. Human civilization has long understood that using the same land over and over again, without interruption, will cause the nutrients in that soil to be depleted and ensure starvation in the long term. To get around this, people often let fields lie “fallow” for a period of time. One of the innovations of the British Agricultural Revolution was the realization that by rotating four particular crops, those crops would use different nutrients and some would even replenish the nutrients in the ground, leading to much less wasted time and space, and less frequent famine and disease.

Cornelius Vermuyden was a Dutch engineer who in the seventeenth century introduced Dutch land reclamation projects to Yorkshire and Lancashire in Northern England. This project turned land in Yorkshire and Lancashire into some of the most fecund and productive land area in England and was an important part of the massive increase in food production in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Enclosure Movement took place gradually in England beginning around the thirteenth century, but really accelerated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during the British Agricultural Revolution. The process involved consolidating all the small agricultural landholdings that existed under the “open field” system into a smaller number of much larger farms. This would have many consequences, but the most notable were the dramatic increase in food production and the forced migration of peasants from the countryside to urban areas in search of work.

The Irish Potato Famine killed roughly one million people in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. The famine was brought on by potato blight, a disease which ruins potato crops.

Charles “Turnip” Townshend was a long-time British politician who upon retiring from public office popularized the use of turnips to keep soil fertile and prevent farmers from having to spend large periods of each year leaving their land fallow. This was an important step in the British Agricultural Revolution.