This chapter examines how the shifting interactions of four key factors (the natural environment, technology, regulation and institutions, and demand) shaped industry dynamics in agriculture over the past six centuries. The first era (1500–1800) was dominated by the transfer of numerous plant and animal species between Europe and the New World. The second (1800–1945) saw the emergence of an institutional infrastructure of support for agriculture that extended into a third era (1945–2020) of unprecedented increases in agricultural productivity anchored by technological innovation. Agriculture’s production of the basic necessities of human life and well-being, combined with the relatively small scale and large numbers of individual operations, led to governments and peer-to-peer organizations playing distinctively large roles in this industry.