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This paper considers the average height of human populations as a biological standard of living, also referred to as a net nutrition index or a chronic malnutrition index. The processing of 61,334 individual records of conscripts born in the Limousin region between 1782 and 1920 and of records of market prices of the Haute-Vienne district allows us to determine the geography and chronology of agricultural changes and their nutritional consequences on the health of both humans and cattle. Following a first phase of erosion in the biological standard of living (conscripts born between 1782 and 1851), there was a long period of increase in human height and cattle weight (conscripts born between 1851 and 1920). From the middle of the 19th century onward, the archaic cattle-raising Limousin region gradually caught up with the national average.