Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/223/en

After the deep ruptures of the seventeenth century, the eighteenth century brought, with the Enlightenment, an awakening in agriculture as well. In its first half there flourished what was called the Hausväter-Literatur — the literature of the household patriarchs — which, looking back upon the lost body of customary wisdom, still sought to grasp agriculture as an organismic, ethically grounded whole. In the second half of the eighteenth century, experimental economics moved into the foreground. What proved itself empirically as rational within the framework of organismic coherence was held up as a guide, and this in turn prepared the ground for the coming agricultural sciences of the nineteenth century. After the prolonged depression that followed in the wake of the upheavals of the Thirty Years' War, agriculture gained new momentum as the eighteenth century advanced. Apart from the handling of a more rational, thought-permeated practice, the improvement of living conditions was owed principally to the «Besömmerung der Brache» — the summer-cropping of the fallow. Within the framework of the three-field rotation that continued to be practised, the fallow areas were sown with root crops (potatoes) and above all with clover. Through this fodder-crop cultivation, soil fertility rose, yields increased, and hardship yielded to a modest prosperity.