The success of the third agricultural revolution

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Moon Jung-hoon

The author is a professor of agricultural economics and rural development at Seoul National University and director of the Food Business Lab. 

Thomas Malthus’s “An Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798), published in Britain, presented humanity with an apocalyptic vision during the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. Malthus argued that while food production would increase only arithmetically, population would grow geometrically, leaving humanity trapped under the constant pressure of poverty and famine. At the time, rapidly industrializing cities across Europe were witnessing a soaring rate of urban poverty, making Malthus’s grim prediction appear plausible.

But agriculture soon produced a technological breakthrough that fundamentally overturned Malthus’s theory. In 1909, German chemist Fritz Haber developed a method for synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer, and Carl Bosch later made mass production possible through high-pressure industrial processing. Once nitrogen fertilizer was applied to crops, yields per unit of land rose beyond anything previously imaginable. Agriculture was no longer strictly constrained by natural soil fertility or the area of arable land available. The “arithmetic limits” of food production envisioned by Malthus began to collapse under the force of technological innovation.

The innovation spread rapidly around the world. Germany established the first commercial nitrogen fertilizer plant in 1913. On the Korean Peninsula, a fertilizer plant was built in what is now North Korea’s South Hamgyong Province in 1927, and nitrogen fertilizer began to be distributed nationwide in 1932. At the time, a sack of fertilizer from the Heungnam factory cost roughly the equivalent of five mal of rice (2.5 bushels), making it expensive by contemporary standards. Even so, farmers eagerly purchased it because applying fertilizer to rice paddies could double harvest yields.

The technological shift dramatically altered the structure of agricultural production. Compared to 1920, cultivated land had increased by only 1.9 percent by 1938. Labor input rose by 8.8 percent, and capital investment by 31.2 percent. Variable costs, however, surged by 658.8 percent, largely due to fertilizer purchases and other agricultural inputs. Nitrogen fertilizer reduced the relative importance of labor in farming and transformed the traditional structure of agricultural production itself.

The spread of this innovation also reshaped Korean eating habits. Per capita rice consumption increased sharply, and white rice gradually replaced mixed-grain meals on ordinary dinner tables. Both the quantity and quality of food improved. Around this same period, a new variety of cabbage introduced from China became the dominant ingredient for kimchi production in Korea.

Another major agricultural breakthrough emerged four decades later through plant breeding. In 1971, Seoul National University Prof. Heo Mun-hui developed and expanded the cultivation of Tongil rice, allowing South Korea to achieve complete self-sufficiency in rice production and effectively render Malthus’s theory obsolete in the South Korean context. The success of Tongil rice also transformed industrial structures. Agricultural production shifted away from the reliance on farmers’ individual experiences toward a state-led technological system. At the same time, industries producing fertilizers, pesticides and other agricultural materials expanded rapidly to support higher crop productivity.

Now, more than 50 years later, South Korea is hoping that smart farming technologies will produce another major leap forward. But so far, the results remain limited.

One reason is that smart farms are not yet closely tied to staple food production or livestock. Most are used to cultivate leafy vegetables and other secondary crops, limiting their overall impact. Smart farms can overcome the seasonal limitations of traditional agriculture, but high installation and energy costs continue to make the resulting produce expensive.

Still, smart farms offer important advantages. They significantly improve working conditions, reducing the physical strain traditionally associated with farming while giving agriculture a more modern image. As a result, more young people are entering the agricultural sector through smart farming.

Smart farming is precisely the kind of field that requires large-scale investment in convergent technologies such as sensing systems, robotics and AI. But South Korea continues to rely heavily on the state-led technological framework established during the Tongil rice era. If a third agricultural revolution is to succeed, South Korea must also accept the industrial transformation that accompanies it and redefine the state’s role in agricultural innovation.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.