Inference crops lead to different incentives and different outcomes for societies.
“the high productivity of rice production meant that labor was relatively abundant in the countryside, as households could subsist on much smaller farmers. But this in turn seems to have shaped the development of rice farming techniques. Wheat- and barley-farming technologies (plows, mills, mechanization) tend to act as labor substitutes, allowing a given amount of labor to farm more land and thus produce more food. In effect, the goal here is to substitute scarce labor and sometimes scarce land with capital. In contrast, increasingly sophisticated rice-farming technologies (and I do want to stress – rice farming gets quite sophisticated in the pre-modern, especially with complex irrigation systems) focused on ways that more labor can be employed to produce more food out of the same amount of land and capital.”
https://acoup.blog/2020/09/04/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-addendum-rice/