How The Agricultural Revolution Impacted Our Environment

Today you can walk into your local grocery store and fill your shopping cart with a variety of fresh produce. Then, with no more effort than it takes to push your cart, you can head to the cereal aisle to pick out your favorite boxes of breakfast cereal before ending your shopping trip in the bread aisle, where you grab a couple of loaves of bread for your lunchtime sandwiches.
What you probably don't realize is that these conveniences that you experience today, could not be a reality if it were not for the Agricultural Revolution that took place hundreds of years ago. In this lesson, we will take a look at how advancements in farming techniques and equipment that happened during the Agricultural Revolution changed our lives, and how they have impacted our environment.
This was a period of significant agricultural development marked by new farming techniques and inventions that led to a massive increase in food production. The Agricultural Revolution brought about experimentation with new crops and new methods of crop rotation. These new farming techniques gave soil time to replenish nutrients leading to stronger crops and better agricultural output. Advancements in irrigation and drainage further increased productivity.
It was also during this time that inventions were created that greatly increased efficiency. The Agricultural Revolution saw the invention of the plow, which is a device that contains blades that effectively break up the soil. Plows created cuts within the soil for the sowing of seeds. Before the invention of the plow, and another device called a seed drill, seeds were sown by hand, which was inefficient and led to many seeds failing to grow. A seed drill is a machine that plants seeds in uniform rows and then covers