Leverage

How Denmark used what they had to build up their agriculture:

The soil was embarrassingly poor for a country with agricultural pretensions--thin and sandy in most places, boggy or overgrown with heath. But by using imagination, they turned a handicap into an asset. While other countries of Europe were clamping down tariffs on imports of cheap American grain, the Danes let it flood in. Their idea was to feed it to livestock and then export meat, poultry and dairy products to Great Britain and other nearby markets. This helped free them of the burden of growing grain themselves, and they devoted the land they otherwise would have needed for grain to raising high-output crops. As their agricultural productivity soared and the numbers of their animals increased, they found in stable manure an unexpected bonus--the means by which to increase the fertility of their soil.    -- Dale Brown, The Cooking of Scandinavia