ABSTRACT
As we enter the twenty-first century, we have a great opportunity to look back over the tremendous progress that agriculture made in the twentieth century. Modern agriculture came into being, and the crop protection industry combined with the fertilizer, hybrid seed, and equipment industries to provide an abundance in agricultural production that few would have believed possible when the century began. Table 1 indicates the dramatic yield increases for corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton from 1920 to 1990, which ranged from 2.5-fold for soybeans to sixfold for wheat. The increased productivity was even more striking when measured by output per farmer, which increased 13-fold from an average of 9.8 people being fed per farmer in 1930 to 129 people per farmer in 1990.
