What is the link between changes in the way that food was produced and the rise in global population during the nineteenth century?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

A. Changes in food production
1. more land was devoted to production
a. large-scale deforestation, drainage, and adaptation of marginal soil
2. efficient exploitation
a. farmers applied traditional methods more systematically
1. agrarian output rose in Japan without more land dedicated
to farming
2. wheat and barley production nearly doubled in the last two
decades of the nineteenth century in Egypt without large
increase in cultivation
3. few major initiatives or accidents incorporated vast, previously unexploited
frontiers
a. natural growth, with little or no human effort
b. added almost 600 square miles, for instance, to the fertile Yellow
River delta in China
c. natural losses—to encroaching seas and deserts—always tend to
offset natural increases
d. land reclaimation
1. 11,000 acres were reclaimed from sea and wasteland in
the Netherlands
e. greatest extension of the frontier of food production
1. Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Australia, and North America
2. exploitation of the North American prairie for cattle and grain
3. extension of grazing
4. Argentina and New Zealand, with refrigeration on
steamships, became major exporters of meat
f. industrial technologies helped turn praries into edible grasses
such as maize and wheat
1. steel plows
2. precision-milled lumber and cheap nails spread cities
3. repeating rifles destroyed buffalo herds and Native
American resistence
4. grain elevators, introduced in 1850, made storage possible
5. machines enabled a few hands to reap large harvests
6. giant mills processed grain into marketable foodstuffs
g. fertilizers increased productivity
1. guano boom and chemical fertilizers
h. research in scientific agronomy
i. industrialization transformed techniques of preserving,
processing, and supply
B. Effect on the rise of population
1. huge increase in available food had an unprecedented impact on the world
2. more food for more people
3. was achieved with a relatively small input of additional labor
4. vast increase of population that the food boom fed was free to
engage in other kinds of economic activity
5. trade, industry, agriculture, and urbanization were linked in a
mutually sustaining cycle of expansion