3. Intro
The British Agrarian Revolution is major cause of the Industrial Revolution
A product of the Scientific Revolution, the Agrarian Revolution sees science and innovation brought to agriculture, which had remained fairly stagnant since the Middle Ages
The Agrarian Revolution begins in the 17th century in Britain

7. The Farmer as a Scientist
Old way of farming: three-field crop rotation
Problem: not productive leaves one field empty and unused

10. The Farmer as a Scientist
New way of farming: four-field crop rotation
The major significance of this development is MORE fields = MORE food
MORE food = MORE people

11. The Farmer as a Scientist
People are healthier
Fewer children die
People live longer
People have more children as prospects in life look better

15. The Farmer as a Scientist
Breeding Animals:
Now: Selective Breeding
(Breeding for specific traits—like how fat/big the animals are)
Ex) Belgian Blue Cow
Effect: MORE food, BETTER food = MORE PEOPLE

19. The Farmer as an Entrepreneur
An entrepreneur is a businessman, someone who takes risks investing in companies or starting their own for potentially high rewards

23. The Farmer as an Entrepreneur
Traditional Agriculture = peasants working in the common field
(This field didn’t really belong to anyone)
Subsistence farming—farming only enough to get by

25. The Farmer as an Entrepreneur
The Enclosure Movement
(This is when landowners started fencing in the common land, no longer allowing the peasants to farm it. They wanted to make profit for themselves.)

27. The Farmer as an Entrepreneur
The Enclosure Movement transitions Britain to a market economy and emphasized private property
The downside: the poor farmers who lost grazing rights for their cattle or land to farm now needed to find something else to do…
They can find a farm to work for
They can rent land to farm
Or they can more to the city and look for other work (urbanization)

29. The Farmer as an Entrepreneur
Many people ended up in poor houses, which were workhouses that provided shelter and employment for the able-bodied poor

31. The Farmer as an Entrepreneur
EFFECT 1: Farming becomes profit motivated which increases crop yield
EFFECT 2: People moved to the city and there is now a ready labor force available in the cities

35. The Farmer as an Inventor
Jesus and the Sower Parable—there is nothing scientific about this method (and I know that the POINT of this parable isn’t to demonstrate how inefficient farming was, but for our purposes, it really does…)

41. The Farmer as an Inventor
New Agricultural Tools:
Jethro Tull’s seed drill
Thomas Jefferson’s moldboard plow
George Washington’s 16-sided barn
Portable threshing machine

43. The Farmer as an Inventor
EFFECT 1: Better tools = more food EFFECT 2: Less labor – increased urbanization