[pixodaros]

Turning to a Hacker News friendly theme, Mr. Watt and Herr Doktor Haber und Bosch have a lot to do with why livestock today are so big and produce so much milk and wool or so many eggs. Internal combustion engines and artificial nitrates let you feed animals more energy-rich food which let them grow bigger and produce more milk and wool and eggs. Animals also grow bigger if they are vaccinated against diseases, medicated against parasites, protected from pests by cheap steel, and watered with filtered water. Animal breeding was just one of the aspects of British agriculture that started to rapidly improve around the 18th century.