Pesticide research in the Austrian Empire proceeded relatively smoothly. Even to this day, Pyrethrum and Derris remained among the most widely used natural insecticides.
Because they had chosen the correct targets from the very beginning, many detours had been avoided. The only issue was that Derris had also begun invading rural areas of the Austrian Empire as an invasive plant.
In the Austrian Empire, nobles and commoners alike enjoyed using its properties to catch fish in small streams and ditches.
But the real reason this plant spread throughout the Austrian Empire was that it could be used to steal fish from other people's ponds.
As for crops, aside from expanding the acreage devoted to sugar beets, corn, and sunflowers, there was little difference from history in other respects.
The reason for expanding the cultivation of these three crops was mainly that, while producing sugar, starch, and oil, they could also provide large quantities of animal feed.
Sunflowers had initially been introduced into the Austrian Empire as an ornamental flower, but farmers driven half-mad by hunger soon began sneaking into their masters' gardens under cover of night to steal sunflower seeds to eat.
Later, the masters simply sold the seeds to the farmers and let them grow them themselves.
Sunflower seeds were an excellent oil crop, but Austrian farmers did not understand that at the time, and landowners were more accustomed to pressing oil from rapeseed and flax.
It was not until the end of the nineteenth century, when someone finally conducted a survey and discovered that sunflower seeds had a remarkably high oil yield, and machinery specifically designed to press sunflower oil was invented, that sunflowers truly entered the ranks of agricultural crops.
For that very reason, sunflower cultivation in the Austrian Empire had been extremely limited in history. But