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Notes -
More (good!) land per farmer plus mechanical reapers. If you didn't know, harvesting ripe grain used to be the limiting factor for farm sizes: it's a very short time frame when your wheat is ripe and dry and not falling off the stalk. It's a lot of literally back-breaking labor to cut the stalks and tie them into sheafs since you cannot use horsepower to do that, so the amount of grain you can harvest is limited by the size of your family that abandons all other activities and spends whole days in the field, young and old alike.
With a mechanical reaper you could reap the way you ploughed and sowed: by walking behind a horse, the reaper cutting and baling the wheat for you. A typical Midwestern farmer could harvest a massive surplus of grain, turning him from a subsistence farmer into a businessman.
Well yes, this is a relevant factor in the late Victorian era. But the per farmer productivity gap opened very early.
Could the difference be corn or higher solar indexes than northern Europe?
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