AGRICULTURE SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. It is difficult for people living in an advanced industrialized society to fully comprehend the life of a modern farmer, much less the life of farmers living before the Industrial Revolution. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the vast majority of people were farmers who, as described by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan, lived lives that were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." And so it had been since the beginning of time for the vast majority of people, until the advent of an agricultural revolution that started in Great Britain during the early 1700s, reached North America by the mid-1800s, and continues to this day in all but the most benighted of nations. Agriculture had been changing since it had first appeared thousands of years earlier, but the pace quickened during the start of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, and...