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Handout 2
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| . . . Why should farmers give up familiar routines and crop rotations to make room for strange plants that looked very different from what they already knew...? Why start to eat something unfamiliar that might be poisonous and that had to be prepared differently from the foods already tried, tested, and available? . . .Population Growth, putting pressure on available land and creating a pool of underemployed labor that could usefully be put to work hoeing fields of corn and potatoes during the growing season, was the usual trigger for bringing in American field crops. The reason is this: maize and potatoes had a fundamental advantage over different sorts of grain that Old World farmers already knew. With suitable growing conditions, they produced more calories per acre – sometimes very many more. Take the north European plain for example. Throughout the region, extending from the coast of the North Sea to the Ural Mountains, rye was the only grain that could be depended on to ripen in the short and often rainy summers that prevail there. But potatoes thrived in such a climate and could ordinarily produce about four times the number of calories per acre that rye did. This meant that across the vast plain of northern Europe four times as many people could live on the produce of the soil when they learned to eat potatoes instead of rye bread. The advantages of raising the new crop were even greater than this remarkable ratio suggests because potatoes could be planted on the fallow fields required for successful cultivation of rye. To begin with, therefore, the new crop did not reduce the production of grain in the slightest. Instead, it occupied fields that had previously produced nothing but self-seeded weeds. Potatoes had another advantage, which in fact triggered their initial acceptance in Europe. Ripe grain must be harvested and then stored in a barn, where it constituted a convenient target for tax and rent collectors in peacetime and for plundering soldiers in time of war. European peasants had learned to live with rent collectors, but wartime requisitioning threatened disaster because hungry soldiers were likely to take everything. . .Potatoes, on the other hand, could be left in the ground through the winter and dug only as needed for daily consumption. Soldiers usually could not take the time to dig a field to get their food, and they certainly would never do so if stores of grain were ready and waiting in neighboring barns. | |
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