Agrarian System and Use of Fertilizers in the 19th Century France

Éric Mermet, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
Laurent Herment, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the use of fertilizers (chemical, mineral or organic) spread in Western Europe, in England first with importation of guano and use of bones, but also in other countries. The local answers to the agricultural survey of 1862 give a lot of information about the use of fertilizer in more than 3,000 cantons. But as figures were not reliable, they never be published. Herment et Mermet (2018 published 2019) have shown that it is possible to use these local data to examine the use of fertilizer in using logistic model and GIS. They did to identify the mean of transportation use to diffuse the fertilizers from main ports and region of production. In this article they use data for two purposes: to identify the link between agrarian system and the use of specific fertilizer, to assess if fertilizers have an effect on the yields of the main crops, depending the region, wheat, rye, sugar-beet, etc and the yield of cow in taking into account the distance to the town. In the first case they use a logistic model, in the second case a linear model.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 267. Agriculture and Energy in Early-Modern and Modern Europe / North America. The Contribution of GIS