The agricultural (agrarian) revolution began in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Prior to that, most farmers lived in villages and walked out to common fields to tend crops mainly for their own consumption, using the same techniques that were employed for millennia. However, some new inventions, such as the moldboard plow; new ideas, such as rotating crops rather than letting fields lie fallow; and new laws, such as the Enclosure Act, which led to the consolidation and private ownership of land, led to a revolution in agricultural production.

In the American colonies, there were large regional differences in agriculture. The colonies were an agrarian society in which more than ninety percent of the population were farmers. In the rocky soil of New England, most people had small family farms, and they often had common grazing land for their livestock on their village greens. In the fertile Southern Colonies, however, large plantations were developed, and slave labor was employed. These plantations grew profitable crops for export, particularly cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugarcane.

In the eighteenth century, spurred by the Enlightenment, scientific methods were developed that increased agricultural yield. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was interested in scientific farming and breeding techniques. Also, new inventions in plows, seeders and reapers were introduced, increasing yield, as well as inventions such as the cotton gin and spinning jenny that led to textile mills and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the North.

As the Northwest Territory opened after the American Revolution, many farmers from New England were able to acquire fertile land in the Ohio Valley. Further inventions in canning and refrigeration led to the ability to grow more crops for distribution.

Another development in the agrarian revolution was the Merrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, which established agricultural colleges to further scientific methods of farming.