ABSTRACT
This chapter devotes to prove or, more accurately, establish the plausibility of the existence of a rise in grain yields between the late fourteenth and nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Two different approaches can be used to demonstrate that grain yields probably raised significantly between 1400 and the early nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Thus the provincial yield estimates tend to support the contention that grain yields per unit of cultivated area raised between 1400 and the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Furthermore, the changes in yields over time are almost all in one direction: rising. The pace of change tended to be dominated by the rate of growth in the number of people. To state that population growth largely determined the rate of growth in farm output is to reverse the usual Malthusian direction of causality, which has the pace of agricultural development determining the level of population.
