Agrotechnical progress comprises research by farmers and public and private providers; invention, discovery or development of a technique; and adoption, from innovation by early users to diffusion by learning or extension. It includes everything from the development of basic agricultural tools to biotechnology.
Agrotechnical progress has repeatedly driven revolutions in food production and transformed human development, from the Neolithic settlement, as former hunter-gatherers became farmers, to the Green Revolution in Asia, which brought unprecedented rises in food production. Only since about 1750, however, has agrotechnical change been a main engine of steady human development, and only since the 1950s has it been deliberately harnessed toward such ends. Indeed, the irrigation and biochemical revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, with all their imperfections, have led the world’s greatest and fastest advance in human development.
