This book offers a broad overview of the history of agricultural knowledge from the 19th century to the present day. There are few areas in the history of modern science that have been so neglected like that of agricultural science. This volume presents for the first time an overall picture of the development of agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries. It provides exhaustive material concerning the institutions and their important innovations as well as how society developed from an agricultural society in the shadow of hunger to an industrial society with excess agricultural production. It also demonstrates how much innovative potential may be found in a methodologically well-founded history of science.