YES

Jane Mt Pleasant at Cornell did a fantastic historical analysis of yield records & showed that Haudenosaunee farmers were getting 40-100 bu/A in upstate NY.

The settlers who chased them out introduced the plow & collapsed maize yields to 25-30 bu/A within a few decades. https://twitter.com/BrianBuchbinder/status/1281214064509796357

That yield collapse hit bottom by at least 1845. So all these noble family farmers' kids had to go raid more land in Ohio (a process that had already started in 1790).

"sustainable" my floppy white ass

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3098/ah.2011.85.4.460?seq=1

It's at moments like these that the "bring back traditional small family farms" movement starts to look a lot less like a "save the world" thing

and a lot more like a "cover our asses for all the world-destroying we've already done" thing, isn't it

BTW this is often where discussions of ag veer off into agropessimism, which is the fancy-pants name I'm giving to "agriculture has always destroyed the environment & irrigation is why civilizations collapse" etc.

The thing is it's NOT well supported by historical evidence

Folks whose history knowledge is mostly from Eurasia have a really hard time distinguishing between "agriculture" & "intense social stratification/rich get richer & poor get poorer" because in Eurasia, yes, those two things went together.

But the Haudenosaunee are another really interesting case study here: they're one of the only societies that started farming (corn arrived to NY sometime in the medieval period) & began to stratify thanks to surpluses

and then deliberately, SUCCESSFULLY rolled it back into stable egalitarian internal politics

and thoroughly documented the whole process.

If you're interested in how ag & political power work, you need to pay close attention to what the Haudenosaunee did & are still doing.

There's a huge diff between "it's *common* for farming to cause warfare, subjugation of women, & environmental degradation" and "it's *inevitable* for farming to cause those things."

there's just. a lot more to human history than the Hittites y'all