Industrialization allowed for the concentration of farms and the use of new products such as chemical fertilizers. As a result, farmers were able to produce more crops on the same square kilometer of land, thereby intensifying the productive capacity of the countryside as a whole. This graph shows the development of yields per hectare of wheat, rye, and barley in five-year averages from 1848–1852 to 1908–1912.
Source: Statistics compiled from E. Bitterman, Die landwirtschaftliche Produktion in Deutschland 1800–1950, Kühn-Archive (Faculty of Agriculture, Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg) 70 (1956).; printed in Hermann Aubin und Wolfgang Zorn, ed., Handbuch der deutschen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte. Stuttgart, 1971–76, vol. 2, p. 518.