Agriculture

12 Pages 2921 Words

ontinued to supply many of their own needs, but increasingly they were selling their produce, much of it abroad, and buying manufactured goods. Cotton was highly important because they earned foreign exchange for investment in American manufacturing and transportation. Moreover, agriculture supplied the raw materials for some of the nation's leading manufactures such as textiles and food products. In brief, agriculture was a powerful engine behind American economic development in the first half of the nineteenth century (Schelbecker 194).
Elise Boulding argued that women initiated the Agricultural Revolution. According to Boulding, the Agricultural Revolution occurred in two stages, horticulture and agricultural proper. Boulding defines horticulture as farming carried out by hand tools that produce enough food for subsistence only. She defines agricultural proper as farming that produces surpluses of food by using plows and other machinery. The result of what women did throughout these two stages of the Agricultural Revolution was crucial bec...