Soru

For over a century, economic historians attributed the productivity gains of the eighteenth-century British agricultural revolution primarily to the elimination of the fallow period via the Norfolk four-course crop rotation (wheat, turnips, barley, and clover). Recent agronomic analyses, however, suggest that continuous cultivation alone was insufficient to explain the surge in grain yields. The critical mechanism was the synergistic combination of leguminous clover, which fixes atmospheric nitrogen into the soil, and turnips, which provided winter fodder that enabled year-round stall-feeding of livestock. Stall-feeding concentrated animal manure into an easily manageable and collectable fertilizer. In contrast, under traditional open-pasture systems, livestock droppings were diffusely deposited across grazing lands, resulting in substantial nutrient loss through runoff and volatilization before the manure could be incorporated into arable soil. Because nitrogen was the absolute limiting nutrient in pre-industrial cereal cultivation, the concentration and targeted application of stall-collected manure elevated soil fertility far beyond what unamended fallowing could achieve.

Which of the following can most reasonably be inferred from the passage concerning traditional farming systems prior to the widespread adoption of the Norfolk four-course rotation?