I think European fertility is often overestimated. Many urban observers, in my view, reveal their city origins when they assume that green landscapes and abundant water automatically mean fertile land that you can instantly plug and play into. It’s true that much of Europe is lush and receives ample rainfall; but far less of that land is actually suited for long-term, intensive agriculture--without work--than most imagine.
For one, large parts of the continent experience cold winters that would destroy the same crops which flourished in the Fertile Crescent, the Sahel, or eastern China — the heartlands of early agricultural revolutions. A lot of Europe’s greenery also grows on what geographers call “marginal land” which is terrain better suited for pasture than for tilling or ploughing. Thin, sometimes rocky soil. Then you also have the fact that large swathes of some of the most fertile farmlands today were basically forests and other such ecosystems until the fairly recent history and had to be cleared for the agricultural purpose they now serve; saved from issues like waterlogging, properly planned and needed certain agricultural innovations to be fully exploited.
There's a reason the Western side of the Roman Empire never caught up to the East in terms of wealth and productvity until well after the West's collapse; a lot of work needed to be done. Those Anatolian Neolithic Farmers didn't suddenly lumber onto Eden and do nothing with it for thousands of years.
Take Greece as a case study of how greenness can be deceptive. Beautiful countryside:
Yet much of it is rocky, thin-soiled, and mountainous, unsuitable for broad-scale cultivation. Historically, the Greeks relied heavily on pastoralism and small-scale, garden-style agriculture, rather than large open-field farming, a pattern still echoed in parts of the Mediterranean today:
Pastoral farming has been a feature of the Greek scene since antiquity. The geomorphology of the area, climatic conditions and the prevailing systems of agricultural production in lowland regions at any given time have all been conducive to the development and preservation of this productive...
pastoralismjournal.springeropen.com
Europe looks sexy to the untrained eye but trust me, it needed a lot of work and time to create the breadbaskets it has today.