Optimal crop package to end famines pre 1800?

It's well known that the Columbian Exchange greatly improved the variety and quality of food available to the average person in Europe, with the potato particularly having a large role. However, famines and mass death from hunger continued in the post Columbus era, even into 19th century.

While famine caused by war is impossible to fully stop (see Yemen today), there ought be a crop package that could insulate the medieval European peasant from hunger better than a potato or wheat monoculture. Is there anything that could work without being too vulnerable to a single strain of blight or a cold summer?
 
You're not going to to get such a package. In general, people tend to increase population to the limits of the food supply (massive, massive overgeneralization, i know).
Then when a bad year comes, ALL the crops do badly, and you get hunger, at best, and often starvation.
The Potato Famine is remembered for a few reasons, but the potato blight was so bad because the weather was cold and wet. Harvests of all kinds were down all across Europe, and the resulting hunger fed the Spring of Nations risings in Germany, France, Italy, etc.

Moreover, there was no crop package that could feed the 1848 Irish population, except the potato.
Irish agriculture HAD been more diversified, but peasant farmers who grew other crops either went hungry or couldn't support multiple son's the next generation.
 
Its also not just crop packages, take wealth (impoverished farmers starve first, and they don't have access to ploughs or beasts of burden), access to regional markets (import food during famines), tax burden, how easy was it for villagers to get finance and implement things like dams, mills, irrigation etc... Before the advent of manufactured fertilizers Malthusian limits always kicked in for every society, it just so happen that England's technological and organizational ability outgrew its population growth.

Adding to Dathi T, Ireland's soils are sandy, wet, and rather poor; perfect conditions for mono-cultural potatoes and inedible linen.
 
As others have already pointed out, higher-yielding crop packages don't really prevent famine because they also permit a higher population.

Therefore, the only pre-1800 package which could do the job is one in which silphium is successfully domesticated. Since that worked as a contraceptive, widespread use of silphium may help prevent famine.
 
Hemp seed is used to fight famine. People don’t usually eat it, but as hemp has commercial uses and are usually harvested before they develop seeds, farmers would let the plant mature in times of famine and eat the seeds instead of cutting the plants early for fiber. It would require a substantial fiber industry to alleviate major famines though.
 
Silphium sounds promising, though the consequences could be enormous if you were able to mass cultivate it on a variety of soils and climates. Female life expectancy might go way up. Women live longer than men when they don't have a dozen kids.
 
Silphium sounds promising, though the consequences could be enormous if you were able to mass cultivate it on a variety of soils and climates. Female life expectancy might go way up. Women live longer than men when they don't have a dozen kids.

... not when they're starving because their family farm can't keep up output at comparative rates and in their old age the "grandkid insurance plan" goes bust. Not everybody is going to begulping down birth control, and in an environment where working hands are the only way to get things done and the family is the main economic unit and welfare system those groups that don't will run roughshod over their neighbors, educational oppritunities being equal.
 
Its also not just crop packages, take wealth (impoverished farmers starve first, and they don't have access to ploughs or beasts of burden), access to regional markets (import food during famines), tax burden, how easy was it for villagers to get finance and implement things like dams, mills, irrigation etc... Before the advent of manufactured fertilizers Malthusian limits always kicked in for every society, it just so happen that England's technological and organizational ability outgrew its population growth.

Adding to Dathi T, Ireland's soils are sandy, wet, and rather poor; perfect conditions for mono-cultural potatoes and inedible linen.
Let's qualify that. It's not that Irish soil in general is poor, it's that the soil available to Irish peasants was poor and tiny.
Potatoes were the only thing providing enough calories per square meter
 
With regard to silphium it is important to note that we don’t actually know if it worked as a contraceptive. We know that the Romans thought it worked as one, but we don’t really know if it’s true. People have tried experiments with asafoetida, which was considered a similar but inferior substitute to silphium by contemporaries, on the basis that if it has contraceptive properties then silphium might have as well. As far as I know they’ve shown that contraceptive properties could have been present but are far from definitive.
 
... not when they're starving because their family farm can't keep up output at comparative rates and in their old age the "grandkid insurance plan" goes bust. Not everybody is going to begulping down birth control, and in an environment where working hands are the only way to get things done and the family is the main economic unit and welfare system those groups that don't will run roughshod over their neighbors, educational oppritunities being equal.

That makes sense. Thanks for the replies, everyone. Clearly the question was based on a false premise!
 
Top