ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURE

ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURE

A brief outline of the origins or the beginnings of agriculture, the starting point of all economic botany, in the form of crop plants and their domestication will help to understand the scope of the subject in greater detail.

A Sumerian harvester's sickle made  from baked clay (ca. 3000 BC).

Man has originated on earth some two million years ago of which the present day civilized man dates back only to an infinitely small fraction of time as some 10,000 years back and the rest of the time he has been a hunter-gatherer. Later, man learned out of necessity, obviously, to cultivate certain plants and food production became more efficient with the origins of agriculture; civilization of man went hand in hand with new techniques of cultivation and bringing more plants into cultivation.

 

Since its development roughly 10,000 years ago, agriculture has expanded vastly in geographical coverage and yields. 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 history of agriculture has played a major role in human history, as agricultural progress has been a crucial factor in worldwide socio-economic change. Wealth-concentration and militaristic specializations rarely seen in hunter-gatherer cultures are commonplace in societies which practice agriculture. So, too, are arts such as epic literature and monumental architecture, as well as codified legal systems. 

When farmers became capable of producing food beyond the needs of their own families, others in their society were freed to devote themselves to projects other than food acquisition. Historians and anthropologists have long argued that the development of agriculture made civilization possible.

Ancient Origins

An ancient Egyptian farmer

The Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, Egypt, and India were sites of the earliest planned sowing and harvesting of plants that had previously been gathered in the wild. Independent development of agriculture occurred in northern and southern China, Africa's Sahel, New Guinea and several regions of the Americas. The eight so-called Neolithic founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer wheat and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax.

By 7000 BC, small-scale agriculture reached Egypt. From at least 7000 BC the Indian subcontinent saw farming of wheat and barley, as attested by archaeological excavation at Mehrgarh in Balochistan. By 6000 BC, mid-scale farming was entrenched on the banks of the Nile. About this time, agriculture was developed independently in the Far East, 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 organized net fishing of rivers, lakes and ocean shores in these areas brought in great volumes of essential protein. Collectively, these new methods of farming and fishing inaugurated a human population boom dwarfing all previous expansions, and is one that continues today.

By 5000 BC, the Sumerians had developed core agricultural techniques including large scale intensive cultivation of land, mono-cropping, organized irrigation, and use of a specialized 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 .Domestication of wild aurochs and mouflon into cattle and sheep, respectively, ushered in the large-scale use of animals for food/fiber and as beasts of burden. The shepherd joined the farmer as an essential provider for sedentary and semi-nomadic societies. Maize, manioc, and arrowroot were first domesticated in the Americas as far back as 5200 BC. The potato, tomato, pepper, squash, several varieties of bean, tobacco, and several other plants were also developed in the New World, as was extensive terracing of steep hillsides in much of Andean South America. The Greeks and Romans built on techniques pioneered by the Sumerians but made few fundamentally new advances. Southern Greeks struggled with very poor soils, yet managed to become a dominant society for years. The Romans were noted for an emphasis on the cultivation of crops for trade.

Middle Ages

A water-raising machine invented by Al-Jazari (1136-1206),  an Arab inventor and engineer.

During the Middle Ages, Muslim farmers in North Africa and the Near East developed and disseminated agricultural technologies including irrigation systems based on hydraulic and hydrostatic principles, the use of machines such as norias, and the use of water raising machines, dams, and reservoirs. They also wrote location-specific farming manuals, and were instrumental in the wider adoption of crops including sugar cane, rice, citrus fruit, apricots, cotton, artichokes, aubergines, and saffron. Muslims also brought lemons, oranges, cotton, almonds, figs and sub-tropical crops such as bananas to Spain. The invention of a three field system of crop rotation during the middle ages, and the importation of the Chinese-invented moldboard plow, vastly improved agricultural efficiency.

Modern Era

After 1492, a global exchange of previously local crops and livestock breeds occurred. Key crops involved in this exchange included the tomato, maize, potato, cocoa and tobacco going from the New World to the Old, and several varieties of wheat, spices, coffee, and sugar cane going from the Old World to the New.

The most important animal exportation from the Old World to the New was those of the horse and dog (dogs were already present in the pre-Columbian Americas but not in the numbers and breeds suited to farm work). Although not usually food animals, the horse (including donkeys and ponies) and dog quickly filled essential production roles on western hemisphere farms.

By the early 1800s, agricultural techniques, implements, seed stocks and cultivated plants selected and given a unique name because of its decorative or useful characteristics had so improved that yield per land unit was many times that seen in the Middle Ages. With the rapid rise of mechanization 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 have led to efficiencies enabling certain modern farms in the United States, Argentina, Israel, Germany, and a few other nations to output volumes of high quality produce per land unit at what may be the practical limit.

The Haber-Bosch method for synthesizing ammonium nitrate represented a major breakthrough and allowed crop yields to overcome previous constraints. In the past century agriculture has been characterized by enhanced productivity, the substitution of labor for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, selective breeding, mechanization, water pollution, and farm subsidies. In recent years there has been a backlash against the external environmental effects of conventional agriculture, resulting in the organic movement.

Agricultural exploration expeditions, since the late nineteenth century, have been mounted to find new species and new agricultural practices in different areas of the world. Two early examples of expeditions include Frank N. Meyer's fruit and nut collecting trip to China and Japan from 1916-1918 and the Dorsett-Morse Oriental Agricultural Exploration Expedition to China, Japan, and Korea from 1929-1931 to collect soybean germplasm to support the rise in soybean agriculture in the United States.

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, according to the International Monetary Fund. Economists measure the total factor productivity of agriculture and by this measure agriculture in the United States is roughly 2.6 times more productive than it was in 1948.

Ancient Indian Economic Botany

From the earliest time, rice, wheat and millets have been the staple food of the vast population of India, as indicated by the presence of charred grains in most of the excavation sites (Plate 1.1). In addition to these, references are abundant in ancient literature about the existence and usage of several other crops of economic importance such as sugarcane, barley, mango, jute, ginger, turmeric, pumpkin, gourd, cucumber, pepper, turnip, sesamum, mustard, cabbage, potato, radish, peas, pulses etc. In ancient time India had innumerable varieties of various crops under cultivation. About 5,000 forms of rice have been collected in the Indian Museum. Historians and archeologists have' accumulated lot of evidence as revealed by sculptures found on ancient temples etc.

Atharva Veda (1500-500 B.C.), Kautilya's Arthasastra (321-186B.C.), Charaka Samhita (100-500 A.D.), Susrata Samhita (200-500 A.D.), Vishnu Purana (500 A.D.), Agnipurana (500- 700 A,D.), Vishnudharmottara Mahapurana (500-700 A.D.) etc. contain wealth of information regarding ancient Indian agriculture.

Apastamba Smrti (200 B.C.-200 A.D.) dealt with Hindu laws relating to agriculture. The Buddhist literature (500 B.C. to 500 A.D.) gave various references about Blight and Mildew; farming operations; shape of rice fields and veterinary practices.

Bruhat Samhita of Varaha Mihira (about 500A.D) is a reputed work on agriculture. The book gave details about the kinds of plants and plant life; rain clouds; rain-support days; winds; indication of yield of crops from blooming of flowers; vegetable horoscopy; methods of ascertaining the presence of water in a dreary region.

Upavanavinoda by Sarangadhara (l120-1330 A.D.) is a systematic text on plants and plant life and horticulture.

In addition to these, ancient Indian sculptures and monuments also contain grains and plants. It is possible in the modern times to estimate the probable period of the origins of the cultivated plants by man with considerable certainty by the recent techniques of carbon dating.

Some estimates indicate that the early methods of cultivation of grains and domestication of animals began round about 8000 B.C. in the mountainous regions of Mesopotamia. The excavations of Tehuacan valley near Mexico city revealed several facts of civilization of man and origins of several crop plants starting with maize (5000 B.C.), squash, chilies, pepper, avocado and amaranth (4900-3500 B.C.).

Another important centre of early agriculture was found in Peru, South America at a later period 3000 B.C. It is probable that agriculture arose independently in Old and New world.

Many theories are in vogue regarding the origins of agriculture, the notable among them being that of a shift in climatic conditions bring about the origins of cultivation. This fact has been revealed from the fossil pollen studies in two lake beds in Iran by H.E. Wright Jr. (cf. Heiser, 1973). These studies indicated such a shift in climate around 11,000 years ago.

The knowledge of how to cultivate plants from seeds is a matter of much conjecture and of the many possible explanations from historians, archeologists even philosophers, poets, that this cultivations of seeds or plants must have been the result of a magico-religious rites by humans.

The knowledge of sex in plants and the knowledge of seeds by humans may be accidental or intentional due to many ceremonies and offerings in the form of sacrifices and this knowledge got percolated to the process of agriculture and domestication of plants. Man must have experimented with all possible food resources of his environment, and by a process of elimination or preference he must have chosen certain plants to domesticate and discard others.