The History of Agriculture

Untold millenia ago the cave man consumed as vegetable food the leaves, stalks, roots, fruits, nuts and seed gathered by the women and children of his tribe in the jungles and forests surrounding his habitat. He was forced to drift north and south with the seasons in pursuit of his food.  One day he discovered that the seed dropped by accident near his cave grew into new seed-producing plants.  It gave him the idea of planting seeds purposely near his dwelling place and, finally of clearing a patch of ground, preparing it by loosening the sod with a crooked stick.  (the first hoe), and seeding it.  Thus man changed from a nomadic poacher roaming for food to a settled farmer, waiting for his next harvest.  With the growth of the tribe, more and more cleared acreage became necessary to meet the rising demand for food, and more manpower was needed to prepare and till the fields.  Ultimately, man decided that the established law of the jungle, to kill all this enemies (the members of other tribes) immediately after they were taken prisoner on his hunting forays, was wasteful.  He brought them home and put them to work on his fields, the first forced-labor slaves in human history.  They call for still more intensive food production for the rising population of these settlements led to the idea of harnessing domesticated animals to the hoe.  Thus the plow became the new tool of agriculture.  

Agriculture is the scientific term for the art of cultivation the soil.

The word is derived from the Latin Ager (field) and cultura (tilling).

The practice of agriculture was the necessary antecedent to a higher form of cultural development, and wherever great states and empires were founded, cereals were grown as staple food.

The cultures of antiquity were all built around the agricultural centers of gran-growing peoples:  The Chinese, Indians, Koreans and Japanese in Asia; the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Phoenicians, Israelites and Syrians in the Near East; the Egyptians, Lydians, Nubians and Carthaginians in Africa; the Cretans, Greeks, Etruscans and Romans in Europe; the Incas, Mayas and Aztecs in South and Central America.  When we look at the farming methods and implements in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, we marvel at the thought that for nearly 7000 years of agricultural development the methods and tools of the toilers in the fields did not change very much.  In our century of industrialization we saw the rise of the mechanical behemoths of modern farming machinery, the reaper and the cotton gin, which not only boomed the agrarian economy of western nations but enhanced the process of industrialization and became a leading factor in the eventual establishment of the western nations as great world markets.  Newer developments in the field of chemistry led to still further uses for the products of agriculture.  Thus today we find need for plants and herbs not only as sources of food, clothing and medicine, but for such hundreds of newly developed industrial needs as tagger the imagination.  However, we have to realize that to this very day in large parts of South America, Africa and the Far East the agricultural methods and  the farming tools are still nearly the same as in Biblical times.

Thanks Johanna Lehner