Liebig's Law of the Minimum
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Liebig's Law of the Minimum, often simply called Liebig's Law or the Law of the Minimum, is a principle developed in agricultural science by Justus von Liebig. It states that growth is controlled not by the total of resources available, but by the scarcest resource. This concept was originally applied to plant or crop growth, where it was found that increasing the amount of plentiful nutrients did not increase plant growth. Only by increasing the amount of the limiting nutrient (the one most scarce in relation to "need") was the growth of a plant or crop improved.
Liebig's Law has been extended to biological populations. For example, the growth of a biological population may not be limited by the total amount of resources available throughout the year, but by the minimum amount of resources available to that population at the time of year of greatest scarcity. That is, the growth of a population of animals might depend not on how much food is available in summer, but on how much food is available in winter.de:Liebigsches Minimumgesetz