Excuse me, if this is the wrong sub for this but I’m genuinly confused. According to [this graph](https://flic.kr/p/5T5hkE) I found by accident, the world population barely increased at all between 1300 and 1900. And then it suddenly took off like crazy. What caused this sudden fast increment of the world population?
In: 78
Answer: there’s a few things, but I’ll mention food.
Artificial fertilizer was created in the 1910s, meaning that instead of depending on nature for nutrient boosts, we could make material to do that. More nutrients a field gets, the more food it can grow.
Mechanized farming started becoming commonplace. A tractor can do the work of dozens of people, and a dozen tractors the work of hundreds. Machines for other parts of the agricultural process meant more produce could be harvested faster and now you can grow more food in a year than you could have in several.
Insecticides also started to become mass produced. A lot of the early ones were as toxic to us as it was to the bugs, but it meant a farmer could now drive off waves of insects that would eat their crop. Eventually safer (somewhat) pesticides came on the market and meant you wouldn’t be infertile and suffering from seizures.
Refrigeration and packaging meant most foods could be preserved well beyond their original forms. Dough conditioners in bread, vacuum sealing, shrink wrapped meat, refrigerators in the homes of most of the developed world.
But most important was widespread adoption of genetically modified seeds. With enough changes, wheat seeds could be planted that had just as much crop as the normal ones, built in resistance to heat or cold, grew faster than normal wheat and required less water. This expands to other plants and now every farmer can grow some of the toughest yet highest yielding wheat dependably.
In combination, food could now be grown almost anywhere, with chemicals and genetic modification to ensure successful harvest, genetic modification to provide a bumper crop every year, machines to harvest all of this food, food science and packaging to ensure it can stay fresh for days or weeks, and the ability to store any extra food you have left into your own personal refrigeration unit.
All this food means you can feed a lot more people.
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