[i_am_proteus]

Pre-Columbian farming in South/Central America was substantially less labor-intense than in Europe and Asia because maize has an intrinsically higher yield in terms of calories per unit labor.

The downside is that maize isn't as nutritious as wheat or rice and needs to be more heavily supplemented with proper protein from meat or pulses - or the human being becomes malnourished.

>Easily obtained, what is more, for maize has always been a crop that demands little effort. The archaeologist Fernando Marquez Miranda has given us an excellent account of the advantages enjoyed by peasants cultivating maize: it required them to work only fifty days in the year, one day in seven or eight, according to season. They were therefore free, perhaps a little too free. The maize-growing societies on the irrigated terraces of the Andes or on the lakesides of the Mexican plateaux resulted in theocratic totalitarian systems and all the leisure of the peasants was used for gigantic public works of the Egyptian type. (It is arguable whether the cause was indeed maize, or irrigation, or the dense population of societies which became oppressive from sheer weight of numbers.)[One]

[One]https://archive.org/details/BraudelFernandCivilizationAndCap... p161

[abrowne]

On the other hand, the physical labor of grinding the kernels into meal, done by women kneeling at large mortar and pestle like tool, was intense and visible in skeletal remains.