 You are clear for launch, and with that shut down your visors, O2 on and prepare for ignition to O2. You can copy that and, um… Hi, I'm Mr. Ruchoff. Alright, so in this lesson what we're going to do is we're going to explain how the agricultural and industrial revolutions have changed the world and have given us the economic systems that we have today. Now, we're not talking about revolutions where our government had been toppled, like in the American Revolution. What we're talking about is a dramatic and wide-reaching change in the way something works or is organized. And there are four major revolutions we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about the Neolithic Revolution, the Second Agriculture Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and something known as the Green Revolution. Now, since three of these revolutions involve agriculture, let's look at what agriculture is. Agriculture's definition is that it's the deliberate modification of the earth's surface through cultivation of plants, and they're raising it animals in order to obtain nourishment or food, or to be able to make money. Now, the word agriculture comes from two Latin words, agar, which means field, and cultura, which means growing. So literally, agriculture means the growing fields. Now the two parts of agriculture involve cultivation. This is preparing and working on land in order to raise crops, what we usually think of farming, and then something called animal husbandry. And no, this is not when you go marry a cow. Animal husbandry is simply the breeding and caring for farm animals. Now we haven't always had agriculture. Before we had agriculture, how we got our food was through hunting, through gathering, and through fishing. And because our prey would move, or we had to move through different areas in order to find different food, this meant that all humans had what is known as a nomadic lifestyle. Now, a nomad is a member of a group that has no permanent home. Instead, they have to be able to travel from place to place to be able to find new hunting grounds, be able to find food to eat, as well as to find pastures so that they could be able to feed their livestock. However, around 12,000 years ago, the greatest invention, the greatest innovation of mankind occurred. That was the finding of agriculture. We call this the Neolithic Revolution that started around 10,000 BC. Now the term Neolithic comes from Neo, which means new, and Lithic, which means stone. So this is really the new stone age. This is when mankind found out that when if I take a seed, I make a hole, I put the seed in the hole, I cover it up, I'd be able to put water on, I allow for sunlight to come down, we can grow our food. And it is absolutely the very most important thing that has ever happened to the human species. And the first place we see this happened was in Mesopotamia and what is known as the Fertile Crescent. This is an area that is along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, along the southeast portion of what is now Turkey, and down between the two river valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris River, which is now known as Mesopotamia. This occurred around 12,000 years ago, but the discovery of agriculture didn't just happen in Mesopotamia. Instead, it happened all around the world between about 3,000 BC and 10,000 BC. Now one of the innovations that happened very early, especially in Mesopotamia and along the Nile in ancient Egypt, was irrigation. This is the artificial application of water to the soil or land. And how it first started was through canals such as this, which actually would bring water from rivers to the places where they were growing food. Now the Neolithic Revolution had incredible effects. First of all, for the first time in the history of mankind, people began to settle in one location. They didn't have to keep moving. This allowed for the development of cities and then to develop a civilization. If it was not for the Neolithic Revolution, quite frankly, we would not have civilizations like we do today. The other thing that happened with the Neolithic Revolution is because we were actually able to stop and be able to produce our own food. We started having surpluses of food, which we could start to trade. And another thing that Neolithic Revolution did was a matter of being able to have labor specialization. For the first time, not everyone had to be dealing with trying to get food. Other people were able to go and do different jobs. Now the type of agriculture that we had in the beginning is called subsistence agriculture. This is when a farmer is just primarily trying to grow enough food for himself and his family. Now subsistence agriculture either occurred in the lands around your house or in the medieval times, most of the land in Europe actually belonged to a king and it was passed on down to nobles or people that the king gave the land to. And where agriculture was done was in what was called common pastures. Everyone in that area would go and have a little plot of land that would actually change every year and that's where you got your agriculture. Now starting around the 12th century, some of these lands were actually portioned off and people actually started having ownership. But we didn't see this privatization of land until we had what is known as the enclosure movement. This happened between about the 18th and 19th century in England. And what we find is because of changes in law and attitudes, we start seeing a movement of ownership from these common pastures to actual private land ownership. Now because when you had land, you would start putting fences around it, we call it the enclosure movement. This allowed for something incredibly important in agriculture called crop rotation. This meant that one year you would have wheat, one year you would grow turnips, one year you would have barley, one year you would have clover and then on the fifth year you would grow wheat again. What this does is allows for the nutrients of the soil to be replenished. And one of the things that crop rotations was allowed to do is you started being able to produce more and more food. This also meant that because you're able to have more food with less people, this actually reduced the number of people that had to work in the fields. This actually provided excess labor. Now this enclosure movement actually spawned two revolutions, the Industrial Revolution and the Second Agriculture Revolution. And before the Industrial Revolution, how products were made were quite frankly at home in what is known as cottage industries. A cottage industry is when people would be making things by hand at their home and then they might either use those products or they would take these and sell on that market. Starting in the 1750s and 1870s, the Industrial Revolution changed all of this. This was a matter of taking that excess labor for people that no longer had to farm and needed something to do and lots of technology that was coming on. And we had a great deal of innovation. We started having basic materials such as iron and steel. We started having different energy sources such as coal that would be able to create steam power. We also had different machinery such as plows and the power looms and spinning genies and all sorts of different machinery. And then we started developing new ways to communicate and be able to travel, including the telegraph and the railroad. But most of all, we started having factories. And because of the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, these factories now could produce in one day 10 times what a person in a cottage industry could make an entire year. And the biggest impact of the Industrial Revolution was it fundamentally changed how goods were produced. It also increased the wealth and standard of living for people. People had better access to cheaper, better, and a more variety of products. We also found that we had an increase in urbanization. Urbanization is the shift of people moving from the rural areas to the cities. The enclosure movement meant there wasn't as many people that had to live in the farms in the rural areas, but the factories were in the cities. So we have these people moving from the rural areas or the countryside into the cities. Now some people were kind of worried about this and one of those was a guy by the name of Thomas Malthus. In 1798 he wrote a book where he warned that agriculture was not going to be able to keep up with the increasing population. But however, what he didn't realize was he was right at the beginning of the second agriculture revolution that roughly happened between 1750 and about 1900. This actually takes many of the innovations of the Industrial Revolution and applies it to agriculture. And one of the things we see coming out of the second agriculture revolution is commercial agriculture. Now remember up until this time we had subsistence agriculture where a farmer would only farm for himself or his family. But now we have commercial agriculture which is when you have people who are growing food specifically for the purpose of selling it as a business. Now one of the reasons why we're able to move from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture was because of the mechanical devices that the Industrial Revolution provided. These were new plows and actually something known as pneumocormic reaper. See in 1800 it would take a farmer nearly a day just to farm just one fifth of a hectare. However, with the pneumocormic reaper which is shown here by 1840, that same farmer could actually farm two and a half hectares in that same day. In other words, they were 25 times more effective. Now, oh by the way, because of mechanical devices for the first time we started actually planting in rows because it was easier to be able to use machinery to be able to harvest. And then we had the railroads. Now the railroad was incredibly important. See before the railroads cities were pretty much dependent upon the farms that are around them. And if you didn't have many farms, if the agricultural areas were not very good around the cities, you had less food and the cities didn't grow very much. But now because of the railroad, farmers could be able to ship their goods hundreds of miles away. So now the cities have a much larger area to be able to bring food in and therefore our cities would be able to continue growing bigger and bigger. The other thing this meant was farmers were now able to go into rich agricultural areas such as the Great Plains because you had trained service into them. And at the end of the Industrial Revolution we started having advances in chemicals. This meant for this agriculture we had new fertilizers and artificial feed. Now the next big revolution in agriculture was the Green Revolution. And the Green Revolution was largely started by an Aggie, Norman Borlaug. Now using genetic modifications, he created the short stock wheat that had higher yields and was disease resistant. Now we worked in several different countries to include Mexico, Pakistan and India. And because of his genetically modified wheat, countries such as Mexico went from being net importers of food to exporters. And in India and Pakistan they were able to double their food production very, very quickly. Now the Green Revolution actually continued from the 1960s to the 1980s, really focusing in on these genetically modified crops. For example, in 1864 India had to import over 10 million tons of wheat every year. But in just seven years India became an exporter of millions of tons of wheat. In fact in just five years India's wheat production more than doubled. Now we've talked about four revolutions. We have the Neolithic Revolution, we have the Industrial Revolution and the Second Agriculture Revolution that was largely started by what was known as the Enclosure Movement and then we have the Green Revolution. Now in each of these we found better and better ways to be able to get food and then to be able to produce products. And this meant we had a great deal of trade and an economy.