Other techniques for improving the yields of agriculture included rudimentary means of employing pesticides to keep crops from being destroyed by insects and other such parasites. The development of improved tools for farming would also play a significant role in the increase of production.
As a direct role of changing from a hunter-gatherer society to an agriculturally-based society, there would be a number of specific changes to the way that particular group of people functioned. In many ways, agricultural societies are responsible for capitalism, or at least responsible for the need for capitalism. Once crops are produced at a level in which there can be a surplus created from their yields, there then becomes two forms of goods with which existence in such a society is based upon. The first would be consumptive goods, which are materials than can be consumed and which are, in the example of an agricultural society, the
Since society would no longer have to hunt to obtain those consumptive goods, there must be a new means of procuring food, which is referred to as capital goods. Capital goods are tools (such as money, currency, clams, or any other object of value) that have little intrinsic value other than their ability to obtain consumptive goods.
Such a drastic change in economy would inevitably lead to other important institutions that agricultural societies would be based upon, such as political changes to govern the system of capital goods and consumptive goods. Technology would of course be produced to aid in the production of such goods (and would be most directly evidenced in the tools and systems used to produce agriculture), while the usage of capital goods would necessarily create a social hierarchy that may be as dramatic as the system of haves -- and have-nots that operates in the modern United States.
