Concentration in English agriculture came from storage, not from skill, and this is the clearest bottleneck story in Part I. Small farmers lacked the assets to store produce, so they sold immediately after harvest into depressed prices, while larger farms invested in infrastructure and held until prices were favourable. Size also bought supply elasticity: large operations could adjust what and how much they produced, small ones could not respond to short-term price changes at all. The result inverts the intuition. Poor harvests favoured large holders, who met their own needs and sold the surplus at premium prices, while small farmers had to buy grain at those same prices for food and for next year's seed. Bad years therefore transferred land upward, which is engrossing. The asset that determined who survived a shock was the ability to wait.

Evidence 1 passage

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Small-scale farmers typically lacked the assets to store their produce. As a result they were often forced to sell their produce immediately after the harvest while prices were depressed. In contrast, larger farms usually invested in infrastructure, enabling them to store their harvest until market prices were more favorable, increasing p

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