11. surplus

History 8 Agriculture Vocabulary

Dictionary.com defines the word surplus as “agricultural produce or a quantity of food grown by a nation or area inexcess of its needs, especially such a quantity of food purchased and stored by a governmental program of guaranteeing farmers a specific price for certain crops” (1). In other words, when a crop yields a surplus, one is no longer subsistence farming (or farming simply for survival). A surplus provides the farmer with enough food to survive, but it also gives the farmer a large advantage: the ability to trade. If a farmer obtains more than is necessary for their survival, then they can sell their remaining crop in the market in exchange for a wide variety of both local and exotic foods. Surpluses greatly enhanced trade, and they also allowed specializations among the population thanks to the fact that not everybody had to farm due to the abundance of food (2).

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2: Manual

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