History of Agriculture

Since its development roughly 10,000 years ago, agriculture has undergone significant developments. Throughout this expansion, new technologies and new crops were integrated. Agricultural practices such as irrigation, crop rotation, fertilizers, and pesticides were developed long ago, but have made great strides in the past century. The recent history of agriculture has been closely tied with a range of political issues including water pollution, biofuels, genetically modified organisms, and farm subsidies. In recent years, there has been a backlash against the external environmental effects of mechanized agriculture, and increasing support for the organic movement and sustainable agriculture.

Ancient Origins

Archaeobotanists and paleoethnobotanists have traced the selection and cultivation of specific food plant characteristics, such as larger seeds and a semi-tough rachis, to just after the Younger Dryas (about 9,500 BC) in the early Holocene in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent. However, there is earlier evidence for use of wild cereals: archaeological and anthropological evidence from sites across Southwest Asia and North Africa indicate use of wild grain (for example, from the 20,000 BC site of Ohalo II in Israel and from sites along the Nile in the 10th millennium BC).

There is even evidence of planned trait selection and cultivation: grains of rye with domestic traits have been recovered from Epi-Palaeolithic (10,000+ BC) contexts at Abu Hureyra in Syria. However, this appears to be a localised phenomenon that resulted from cultivation of stands of wild rye, rather than a definitive step towards domestication.

It isn't until after 9,500 BC that the 8 so-called 'founder crops' of agriculture appear: first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax.

By 7000 BC, sowing and harvesting reached Mesopotamia and there, in the fertile soil just north of the Persian Gulf, Sumerians systematised it and scaled it up. From at least 7000 BC, the Indian subcontinent saw farming of wheat and barley, as attested by archaeological excavation at Mehrgarh in Balochistan. In Europe, there is evidence of emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, sheep, goats and pigs that suggest a food producing economy in Greece and the Aegean by 7000 BC.

By 6000 BC, mid-scale farming was entrenched on the banks of the Nile River. About this time, agriculture was developed independently in the Far East, probably in China, with rice rather than wheat as the primary crop. Chinese and Indonesian farmers went on to domesticate taro and beans including mung, soy and azuki. To complement these new sources of carbohydrates, highly organised net fishing of rivers, lakes and ocean shores in these areas brought in great volumes of essential protein.

Archaeological evidence from various sites on the Iberian peninsula suggest the domestication of plants and animals between 6000 and 4500 BC. Céide Fields in Ireland, consisting of extensive tracts of land enclosed by stone walls, date to 5500 BC and are the oldest known field systems in the world.By 5000 BC, domesticated horses were found in the Ukraine.

Maize was first domesticated, probably from teosinte, in the Americas around 3000-2700 BC, although there is some archaeological evidence of a much older development. The tomato, potato, pepper, squash, several varieties of bean, and several other plants were also developed in the New World.

Bronze Age

By the Bronze Age, wild food contributed a nutritionally insignificant component to the usual diet. By 5000 BC, the Sumerians had developed core agricultural techniques including large scale intensive cultivation of land, organised irrigation, mono-cropping, and use of a specialised labour force, particularly along the waterway now known as the Shatt al-Arab, from its Persian Gulf delta to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. Intensive farming allowed a much greater density of population than could be supported by hunting and gathering, and allowed for the accumulation of excess product for off-season use, or to sell/barter.

Domestication of wild aurochs and mouflon into cattle and sheep, respectively, ushered in the large-scale use of animals for food/fibre and as beasts of burden. The shepherd joined the farmer as an essential provider for sedentary and semi-nomadic societies.

The Roman Era

Roman agriculture built off techniques pioneered by the Sumerians, transmitted to them by subsequent cultures, with a specific emphasis on the cultivation of crops for trade and export. There was a great deal of commerce between the provinces of the empire, all the regions of the empire became interdependent with one another, some provinces specialised in the production of grain, others in wine and others in olive oil, depending on the soil type.

The Romans laid the groundwork for the manorial economic system, involving serfdom, which flourished in the Middle Ages. The farm sizes in Rome could be divided into three categories:

• Small farms were from 18-88 iugera (about 12-57 acres)
• Medium-sized farms were from 80-500 iugera (about 52-325 acres)
• Large estates (called latifundia) were over 500 iugera (about 325 acres)

The Romans had four systems of farm management:

• direct work by owner and his family
• slaves doing work under supervision of slave managers
• tenant farming or sharecropping in which the owner and a tenant divide up a farm's produce;
• situations in which a farm was leased to a tenant.

The Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, Muslim farmers in North Africa and the Near East developed and disseminated agricultural technologies including the use of machines such as norias, irrigation systems based on hydrostatic and hydraulic principles, and the use of water raising machines, reservoirs and dams. They also wrote location-specific farming manuals, and were instrumental in the wider adoption of crops including rice, sugar cane, apricots, citrus fruit, artichokes, cotton, aubergines and saffron. Muslims also brought almonds, lemons, cotton, oranges, figs and sub-tropical crops such as bananas to Spain.

The importation of the Chinese-invented mouldboard plough and the invention of a three field system of crop rotation during the Middle Ages, vastly improved agricultural efficiency. Another important development towards the end of this period was the discovery and subsequent cultivation of fodder crops which allowed over-wintering of livestock.

The 16th-19th Centuries

After the discovery of the New World in 1492, the world's agricultural patterns were shuffled in the widespread exchange of animals and plants known as the Columbian Exchange. Crops and animals that were previously only known in the New World were now transplanted to the Old and vice versa. Perhaps most notably, the tomato became a favourite in European cuisine, and maize and potatoes were widely adopted. Other transplanted crops included the potato, cocoa, pineapple and tobacco. Several varieties of wheat, spices, coffee, and sugar cane went from the Old World to the New. The most important animal exportations from the Old World to the New were those of the horse and dog. Although not usually food animals, the horse (including donkeys and ponies) and dog quickly filled essential production roles on New World farms. In the expanding Plantation economy, large plantations producing crops including sugar, cotton, and indigo, were heavily dependent upon slave labour.

Between the 16th century and the mid-19th century, Great Britain saw a massive increase in agricultural productivity and net output. New agricultural practices such as enclosure, mechanisation, four-field crop rotation and selective breeding enabled an unprecedented population growth, freeing up a significant percentage of the workforce, and thereby helped drive the Industrial Revolution. By the early 1800s, agricultural practices, particularly careful selection of hardy strains and cultivars, had so improved that yield per land unit was many times that seen in the Middle Ages and before.

The 18th and 19th century also saw the development of greenhouses, initially for the protection and cultivation of exotic plants imported to Europe and North America from the tropics. Experiments on plant hybridization in the late 1800s yielded advances in the understanding of plant genetics, and subsequently, the development of hybrid crops. However, increasing dependence upon monoculture crops led to food shortages and famines, most notably the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849), which led to the death of approximately 1 million people through starvation and disease; a further million are thought to have emigrated as a result of the famine.

The 20th Century

With the rapid rise of mechanisation in the late 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in the form of the tractor, farming tasks could be done with a speed and on a scale previously impossible. These advances, in conjunction with to science-driven innovations in resources and methods, have led to efficiencies enabling modern farms to output volumes of high quality produce per land unit at what may be the practical limit.

The Haber-Bosch method for synthesising ammonium nitrate represented a major breakthrough and allowed crop yields to overcome previous constraints. First patented by German chemist Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, while working for German chemical company BASF, successfully commercialised the process and secured further patents in 1910. Norman Borlaug and other scientists began developing crops for increased yields in the 1940s in Mexico. Their work lead to the Green Revolution, which applied western advances in fertilizer and pesticide use to farms worldwide, with varying success. Other applications of scientific research since 1950 in agriculture include gene manipulation, Hydroponics, and the development of economically viable biofuels such as Ethanol.

The development of rail and highway networks and the increasing use of container shipping and refrigeration in developed nations have also been essential to the growth of mechanised agriculture, allowing for the economical long distance shipping of produce.

However, although the intensive farming practices pioneered and extended in recent history generally led to increased outputs, they have also led to the destruction of farmland, most notably in the dust bowl area of the United States following World War I.

In 2005, the agricultural output of China was the largest in the world, accounting for almost one-sixth world share followed by the EU, India and the USA.

As global population increases, agriculture continues to replace natural ecosystems with monoculture crops. Since the 1970s, western farmers and consumers have become increasingly aware of, and in some cases critical of, widely used intensive agriculture practices. This growing awareness has lead to increased interest in such areas of agriculture as organic farming, permaculture, Heirloom plants and biodiversity, the growth of the Slow Food movement, and an ongoing discussion surrounding the potential for sustainable agriculture.