Agricultural engineering

Abstract

In the past 50 years, agriculture in the industrialised world, especially in North America and Western Europe, has achieved an enormous increase in productivity. In the early 1950s, the output of a single farmer in Western Europe was merely sufficient to supply 10 people with food. By the turn of the millennium, the average farmer was producing enough food for more than ten times as many persons. The reasons for this increase in productivity are not only progress in plant breeding, plant nutrition and the control of plant diseases and pests, but primarily also technical developments. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.