Modern agriculture in the middle of the 18th century

During this period agriculture was strongly influenced by Enlightenment and modern science and therefore there were a lot of fundamental changes: For centuries the farmers worked with so called three-field rotation. In this system every year one third of the farmland were fallow fields to recover. But because of the introduction of new plants which made a different crop rotation possible and because of artificial fertilizer it was now possible to use the soil more intensively and to skip the fallow year. Johann Rudolf Tschiffeli was one of the driving forces during this revolution of agriculture and Pestalozzi wanted to succeed him.

Additionally agriculture got a philosophical basis. During the time of the French absolutism the mercantilism had declared that precious metal was the foundation of an economic prosperity. But the physiocratism following Rousseau contradicted this theory. In their opinion the prosperity of a society depended from the products of the fields and from a good working agriculture. Therefore now one aim of economics was to bring agriculture up to date. The physiocratism fought against the lack of freedom of the trade and the control over the production by the guilds. At the same time they supported the private business world to reach a natural balance in economy by "free play of forces". The optimal result to meet the demands of the people should be a free market economy and international free trade.