Plowing up the world’s grasslands, c. 1850

One of the great transformations in global environmental history has been the plowing up of the world’s grasslands to grow grain. The process began at the western end of the Eurasian steppes in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great plow up spread to vast areas of the prairies and Great Plains of North America, the Pampas of South America, the veldt of southern Africa, and lands further afield.