agriculture, history origins ofhistory of the practice of cultivating the soil, harvesting crops, and raising livestock from its origins in prehistoric times to the present.



Origins of agriculture


Earliest beginnings






Research techniques





How agriculture and domestication began





Earliest beginnings

The domestication of plants and animals caused changes in their form and that ; the presence or absence of such changes may indicate whether the animal or plant was domesticated at some time in the pastindicates whether a given organism was wild or a domesticate. On the basis of such evidence, some scholars have hypothesized a preliminary agricultural phase of intensive food gathering in the Middle East about 9000–7000 BC, when man passed one of the oldest transitions from hunting and gathering to food producing or agriculture. The Natufians of Palestine, who possessed sickles, lived at this time; whether the grain they harvested was sown or wild is not known. Cattle were probably domesticated during this period or slightly earlier from the wild ox (Bos taurus), which stood six to seven feet (1.8 to 2.1 metres) high at the withers (the ridge between the shoulder bones). At Shanidar, in Iraq, it is claimed that sheep, similar to wild varieties in form and structure, were kept in herds. Furthermore, it has been suggested on somewhat speculative grounds that einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum), emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum), and wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum) were cultivated about 7000 BC at Ali Kosh on the borders of Iraq and Iran.


Early development





Early development





Southwest Asia










The Americas







Along the Danube River, the great postglacial European forest was penetrated by slash-and-burn agriculture based on cereals. In the See also history of Mesopotamia.

The Americas






East Asia






As agriculture spread to more-temperate regions in Europe, practices that focused on cattle, pigs, emmer, einkorn, and legumes became important. In the milder and more arid regions along the Mediterranean coast, fewer modifications were necessary. The When available, the incorporation of indigenous wild stock , wherever available, into domesticated herds doubtless aided their animals’ acclimatization, for this a practice that continued into historic times. The earliest evidence for agriculture northwest of the Black Sea comes from the Starčevo-Cris culture (c. 7500 BP), where four types of wheat, as well as oats (Avena sativa), barley, peas, and broomcorn millet, have been found. The millet is particularly interesting because it was extensively grown in Hungary until the invasion of the Mongols.northern China at the same time and presumably originated there, although it may have been independently domesticated in eastern Europe.



Early agricultural societies

In the Old World, settled life had developed on the higher ground from Iran to Anatolia (site of modern Turkey) and the Levant , and in China in the semiarid loess plains , but and the humid Yangtze valley. In contrast, the earliest civilizations based on complex and productive agriculture developed on the alluviums of the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile rivers. When the first villages appeared there is not certain. It is known, however, that villages Villages and townships existed in the Euphrates Valley valley in the latter part of the 5th 7th millennium BC BP. Soon the population was dispersed in hamlets and villages over the available area in agricultural units based upon hamlets and villages. Townships . Larger settlements provided additional services that the hamlets themselves could not provide. On this basis, Sumerian civilization developed.


Sumer, located in the southernmost part of Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was the home of the one of the first civilizations, Sumeria. Sumeria’s Early Dynastic Phase began about 5000 BP, a century or so after the development of a nuanced writing system based on the Sumerian language. Barley was the main crop, but wheat, flax (Linum species), dates (Phoenix species), apples (Malus species), plums (Prunus species), and grapes (Vitaceae species) were also grown. The This was the period during which the earliest known white woolly, and therefore evidence of carefully bred , sheep and goats were herded and were has been found; these animals were more numerous than cattle . The sheep and were kept mainly for meat and , milk; , butter, and cheese were made. It has been estimated that at Ur, a large town covering some 50 acres (20 hectares) within a cultivated enclave, there were 10,000 animals confined in sheepfolds and stables, of which 3,000 were slaughtered each year. Ur’s population of about 6,000 people included a labour force of 2,500 who annually cultivated 3,000 acres of land (some 1, leaving 3,000 acres 200 hectares), leaving an equal amount of land fallow. The work force workforce included storehouse recorders, work foremen, overseers, and harvest supervisors, as well as labourers. Agricultural produce was allocated to temple personnel in return for their services, to important people in the community, and to small farmers.

The land was plowed cultivated by teams of oxen pulling light unwheeled plows, and the grain was harvested with sickles in the spring. Wagons had solid wheels with leather tires held in position by copper nails. They were drawn by oxen or the now-extinct Syrian onager onagers (wild assasses) , that were harnessed by collars, yokes, and headstalls , and controlled by reins and a ring through the nose or upper lip and a strap under the jaw. As many as four animals, harnessed abreast to a central pole, pulled a wagon. The horse, which was probably domesticated about 4000 BC 6000 BP by pastoral nomads in the what is now Ukraine, did not in fact displace the heartier onager as a draft animal in Mesopotamia the region until about 2000 BC4000 BP. Soon after, written instructions appeared for the grooming, exercising, and medication of horses; presumably for breeding purposes, horses were named and records of sires kept. The upper highland areas continued to be exploited by transhumant nomads.

The Nile Valleyvalley

In ancient Egypt, intensified agricultural exploitation apparently did not take place intensify until domesticated animals from the Middle East Southwest Asia were introduced. By the first quarter of the 5th 7th millennium BC BP in alAl-Fayyūm, there existed villages that kept some villages were keeping sheep, goats, and swine and cultivated wheat (cultivating emmer), barley, cotton, and flax, which was woven into linen. In this dry climate, village silos consisted of pits lined with coiled basketry; crops were harvested with reaping knives slotted with sharp flints. Elsewhere, at alAl-Badārī Badarī in Upper Egypt, animals were also kept; the fact that dead domesticated animals were wrapped in linen and then buried close to villages perhaps indicates may indicate that agriculture was closely associated with some form of religious belief.

By the time of the predynastic Amratian timesculture, about 3600 BC5550 BP, agriculture appears to have begun in the valley alluviums of the Nile. By late predynastic times, about 3100 BC5050 BP, there is evidence of a considerable growth in wealth consequent upon the earlier deriving from agricultural development and accompanied by a more integrated hierarchical social system.

From depictions Depictions on the tombs and other artifacts in dynastic times, it is known from the dynastic periods indicate that, in addition to present-day domesticates, other animals , such as the gazelle, deer , gazelles, hyenas, and Barbary sheep(Cervidae species), hyena (Hyaenidae species), and aoudad, or Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia), were kept either in captivity or under some form of control. Whether or not this man–animal relationship can be regarded as domestication is a matter of semanticsunclear, but certainly some aspects of animal husbandry were practiced with these unusual animals. Though it is not known how far back in time such practices existed, some Some early villages in Egypt were dependent upon gazelles for their source of animal protein, as was the township of Jericho, in Palestine, about 7000 BC. Indeed, such a dependence on the gazelle is known to go back to Upper Paleolithic times in Palestine, and the question arises whether this was due to earlier forms of domestication. Discoveries at Nahal Oren, in Israel, indicate that this may be truerelied heavily on gazelles as a food source. Some scholars have suggested that incipient gazelle domestication may have been under way during the predynastic period, but this hypothesis has been challenged by other researchers. It has also been suggested that millet was a staple crop in early times in ancient Egypt.


Irrigation and the waters of the Nile were carefully controlled. Records show that King Menes, who lived about 2925 BC4875 BP, had a large masonry dam built to control the Nile River and provide water for irrigation. A millennium later the Nile at flood was diverted through a channel 12 miles (19 kilometreskm) long into Lake Moeris so that, after the flood, water in the lake could be released for irrigation. Seed grain was lent to tenants, and teams of oxen were lent or hired to them. The land was tilled with a wooden plow drawn by an ox or an ass traction (see photograph ). The land was plowed twice, once to break the ground, after which the clods were broken up by heavy hoes, and a second time to cover the seed. Six-rowed barley and emmer wheat were the main crops. The seed was sown by a funnel on the plow or, alternatively, was trodden in by sheep. The crops were cut with sickles, which had been improved by the introduction of a curved handleblade. The harvest produced 11 times the sowing, but it is not known whether or not two crops were grown within the year. The grain was threshed by asses or cattle treading on it on the threshing floor. It was winnowed by tossing in the wind, which caused the chaff blowing to blow away and the grain falling to fall back into the basket (see photograph ), and was then stored in great silos. Lentils, onions, beans, and flax flax, and onions (Allium species) were other important Egyptian field crops.

Production of animal protein was also given attention. The wetter areas were exploited by domesticated ducks and geese. The marshes, swamps, wasteland, and stubbles were grazed by numerous herds of The production of animals for food was also important, and records indicate that people raised cattle (black, piebald, and white), sheep with kempy (coarse) coats, goats, and pigspigs, and domesticated ducks and geese. One wealthy landlord in the 6th dynasty owned 1,000 cattle, 760 asses, 2,200 goats, and 1,000 sheep. Animal breeding for specialized purposes was also developed; : one breed of cattle was kept for meat and another for milk; a Saluki-like hunting dog was bred, as were ; and a type of fat-tailed sheep with tails so heavy they were carried by a small cart drawn behind.

Mesoamerica and Peru





Villages did not become common in the Americas until the so-called Early Formative period, which began about 3800 BP, after corn was domesticated. Village life was based on the extended family, composed of parents and their children’s families, which provided the labour force. Villages were organized into larger territorial units based on ceremonial centres that commonly in the form of featured flat-topped pyramids. Eventually, Formative groups such as the Olmec, known for carving colossal stone heads, developed large prosperous towns. Larger territorial units developed early in the 1st millennium AD.





South America







North America














Agriculture in ancient Asia

On his way across the Pamirs in search of Buddhist texts (AD 518 CE), the Chinese pilgrim Sung Yün Song Yun noted that the crest of the bare, cold, snowy highlands was commonly believed to be “the middle point of heaven and earth”:

The people of this region use the water of the rivers for irrigating their lands; and when they were told that in the middle country ([China) ] the fields were watered by the rain, they laughed and said, “How could heaven provide enough for all?”

Yet, heaven provided. It has long supported more than one-half of humanity on less than a seventh of the Earth’s land surface along the continental rim to the south and east of the high interior mass with its festoons of mountains. In the so-called “golden fringe to a beggar’s mantle”—from The vast majority of the population of Asia lives in the regions between the inland mountains and the seas—from Pakistan through India, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, IndochinaLaos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and eastern China up to the Bo Hai (Gulf of Chihli, ) and the offshore island groups of Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon)—lives the vast majority of the population of Asia. Some 1,800,000,000 people are concentrated in two . In the early 21st century some 2.5 billion people were concentrated in just two of these countries, China and India.




Vavilov thought that the mountainous regions of central and western China, together with the adjacent lowlands, constituted the earliest and largest independent centre of the world’s agriculture. From earliest times, land use agriculture in China has been divided into two major regions by the Tsinling Qin Mountains, with wheat and millet predominant in the northern realm and rice in the south. At different periods and places, subsidiary crops have included soybean, kaoliang (a grain sorghum), millet, corn, barley, sweet potatoes, peanuts, fruits, and vegetables. Cotton, tobacco, sugarcane, tea, and sericulture (silkworms) have been the important cash crops.

Early history

Archaeological information is comparatively scanty. It does not reveal when and how the first farmers settled down to cultivate food crops. Written records, available from about 1750 BC, are more conclusive. Tradition accords the honour of inventing agriculture to the legendary emperor Shen Nung, who is said to have carved a piece of wood into a plowshare and bent another piece to make a handle and taught the world the advantages of plowing and weeding. The chronicle Pai-hu t’ung relates that he did so out of necessity, because “the ancient people ate meat of animals and birds.” At the time of Shen Nung, there were so many people that the wild animals and birds became inadequate for people’s wants, and therefore Shen Nung taught the people to cultivate. As for the origin of cultivated plants, the problem was resolved by divinity: “Millet rained from heaven. Shen Nung collected the grains and cultivated them.” Pigs are believed to have been domesticated in eastern Asia as early as 2900 BC.

Apparently the “millet from heaven” rained over the North China Plain in the central region of the Yellow River Valley, which is regarded as the birthplace of agriculture-based civilization in China. From there it spread throughout the country, but it failed to penetrate the northern grassland and plateaus. The Great Wall may be taken to demarcate the approximate frontier between the two basically different ways of life—the agrarian to the south and the pastoral nomadic of the steppes and deserts on the other side.

It is thought likely that the practice of irrigation spread to China from Babylonia. The Chinese are known to have had irrigation before 2200 BC. Notable Chinese irrigation works include the Tu-kiang Dam, built about 200 BC, which provided water for about 500,000 acres, and the Grand Canal, built in stages over several centuries and eventually extending for more than 1,000 miles.

The classical-imperial eraIn about 335 BC, the Chinese philosopher Mencius wrote that


Early history












The classical-imperial era

About 335 BCE China’s potential cropland was so expansive that the philosopher Mencius wrote, “If the farmer’s seasons are not interfered with, there will be more grain in the land than can be consumed.” By the 1st century BC BCE, however, wastelands were being reclaimed for cultivation, and there was a demand for limitation of landholdings. In about AD About 9 , CE the first (unsuccessful) attempt was made to “nationalize” the land and distribute it among the peasants. By the end of the 2nd century AD CE, severe agrarian crises culminating generally in the downfall of the ruling dynasty had become a recurrent theme of history. Through the centuries, then, much of Chinese agriculture has been characterized by a continual struggle between man and land to raise ever more food.

By the 4th century AD CE, cultivation was more intensive in China than in Europe or the rest of Asia. The major cereal-producing region and the population, however, were shifting rapidly from the wheat and millet area of the North China Plain to the paddies of the lower Yangtze Valleyvalley. By the 8th century the lower Yangtze was exporting enormous quantities of grain into the old Northwest northwest by way of a unified system of canals linking the large rivers.

By about AD 1100 CE the population of South China had probably tripled, while that of the whole country may have exceeded 100 ,000,000million. Consequently, cultivation became extremely intensive, with a family of 10 crowdedliving, for example, onto on a farm of about 14 acres (5.6 hectares). Again, more new lands were opened to cultivation. Even tanks, ponds, reservoirs, streams, and creeks were reclaimed to be turned into farms. At the same time, complex water-driven machinery came into use for pumping irrigation water onto fields, for draining them, and for threshing and milling grain. A large variety of improved and complicated field implements were also employed; these are described and illustrated in the agricultural literature of the day.

Tools and techniques

The first significant revolution in Chinese agricultural technology had occurred when iron agricultural implements became available to the Chinese peasantry. The earliest iron plow found in northern Honan Henan dates from the Warring States period (475–221 BC BCE) and is a flat V-shaped iron piece that must have been mounted somewhat insecurely on wooden blades and handles to serve as working edges. It was small, and there is no evidence that draft animals were used. Cattle-drawn plows do not appear until the 1st century BC BCE.

Several improvements and innovations, such as the three-shared plow, the lou-li louli (plow-and-sow) implement, and the harrow, were developed subsequently. By the end of the Sung Song dynasty in 1279, Chinese agricultural engineering had reached a high state of development.


Over the past millennium, in fact, the revolution in Chinese agriculture has was not been in mechanical or chemical technology but rather in the biological sphere: in crops, cropping systems, and land utilization. Under increasing population pressures, cultivation was forced to become more labour-intensive and also to expand into the sandy loams, the arid hills, and the upper reaches of lofty mountains. Lacking major technological inventions, the Chinese peasant had to expand the area under cultivation by finding suitable crops for inferior land.

Land use

A “three fields in two years” rotation system for wheat and millet was being practiced by the 6th century AD CE. Revolutionary changes in land utilization, however, started with the introduction in Fukien Province Fujian province of an early-maturing and relatively drought-resistant rice from Champa, in central Indochinaa kingdom in what is now Vietnam. In 1012, when there was a drought in the lower Yangtze and Huai Ho River regions, 30,000 bushels of Champa seeds were distributed. Usually a summer crop, the native rice plant of these locales required 150 days to mature after transplanting. Not only did this make a second crop difficult, but, because of the plant’s soil and water requirements, cultivation was confined largely to the deltas, basins, and valleys of the Yangtze. The original imported Champa rice, on the other hand, ripened in just 100 days after transplanting and required less water.

The success of Champa rice initiated the development and dissemination of many more varieties suited to the local peculiarities of soil, temperature, and crop rotation. The first new early-ripening strain to develop required 60 days after transplantation. By the 18th century , there was a 50-day Champa and a 40-day Champa had been developed. In 1834 , a 30-day variety was available—probably the quickest-ripening rice ever recorded. The effect was revolutionary. By the 13th century, much of the hilly land of the lower Yangtze region and Fukien Fujian had been turned into terraced paddies. At the close of the 16th century, Champa rice had made double, and sometimes triple, crops of rice cropping common.

A second revolution in land utilization began in the 16th century, with the adoption of food crops from the New WorldAmericas, such as corn, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and peanuts (groundnuts). These could be grown at drier altitudes and in sandy loams too light for rice and other indigenous cereals. Virgin heights of in the Yangtze region and North northern China were turned into corn and sweet-potato farms. As the population in the mountain districts increased, the potato took over the soils too poor for corn and sweet potatoesthose crops. By the middle of the 19th century, even ravines and remote mountains were being cultivated. Similarly, the cultivation of peanuts penetrated the remote and agriculturally backward areas of KwantungGuangdong, KwangsiGuangxi, and Yunnan provinces and the sandbars of SzechwanSichuan. Gradually, they brought about a revolution in the utilization of sandy soils along the lower Yangtze, the lower Yellow RiverHuang He, the southeast coast, particularly Fukien Fujian and KwantungGuangdong, and numerous inland rivers and streams.

Even so, the revolution in land use failed to alter the basic man–land human-land relationship in China. Again in In the 18th century , the Qianlong emperor Ch’ien-lung rejected renewed demands for limitation of landownershipland ownership. In an edict (1740), however, he noted that “the population is constantly increasing, while the land does not become any more extensive.” He directed his subjects, therefore, to cultivate all and every odd piece of soil,

on top of the mountains or at the corners of the land. All these soils are suitable either for rice or for miscellaneous cropscrops…. . . . No matter how little return the people may receive from cultivation of these lands, it will be always helpful in supplying food provisions for the people.

The Indian subcontinent

India’s most important contribution to world agriculture is rice (Oryza sativa), the staple food and crop of most of southern, Southeast, and East Asia. Sugarcane, varieties of legumes, and several kinds of tropical fruit, such as the mango and the muskmelon (Cucumis melo), also are native to the Indian subcontinent.

Archaeological records of this region’s prehistory are still incomplete and uneven. Evidence of how the transition from pastoralism to crop farming took place is lacking. Toward the close of the 3rd millennium BC











The Indian subcontinent



Agriculture was well established throughout most of the subcontinent by 6000–5000 BP. During the 5th millennium BP, in the alluvial plains of the Indus River in Pakistan, ruins of the cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappā reveal an apparently sudden Harappa experienced an apparent explosion of an organized, sophisticated urban culture. This society, known as the Harappan or Indus , or Harappan, civilization, flourished until about 1750 BC and shortly after 4000 BP; it was much more extensive than those of Egypt or Babylonia and appeared earlier than that of analogous societies in northern China. Peculiarly Indian, Harappan society was remarkably homogeneous, thoroughly individual and independent, and technically the a technological peer of the early civilizations of China and Egypt. Nothing is known, however, about the farm communities that must have produced a surplus of agricultural products sufficient to sustain the population and fill the granaries of the metropolitan centres. At Harappā, for instance, the granary consisted of two blocks of six chambers each. The floor space of the 12 units covered an area of more than 90,000 square feet (about 8,100 square metres).

Barley (Hordeum vulgare), a small-seeded, six-rowed variety, and two types of wheat—club wheat (Triticum aestivum) and an Indian dwarf variety (T. sphaerococcum)—were evidently the main cereal crops, supplemented by dates, sesame (Sesamum indicum), field peas, and lentils. Humped Indian cattle and a humpless breed, goats, , were the primary crops. Goats, sheep, fowl, humped and humpless breeds of Indian cattle (Bos indicus), and the Indian elephant (Elephas maximus) had been domesticated. In addition to the domestication of a great variety of animals, fragments of dyed and woven cotton fabric attest to the antiquity of the cultivation of cotton plants and of the textile industry for which India was to become famous the world over.

No Little archaeological or pictorial evidence of farm implements has survived, and the Harappan script is yet to be deciphered. It has been surmised, however, that the cereals could have been sown in the fall, on inundated land after the annual flooding of the rivers had receded, and then harvested in spring. The system is still in use and That system continues to be used into the 21st century; it involves minimal skill, labour, and equipment. The , as the land does not have to be plowed, fertilized, or irrigated.

It was clearly more than a subsistence economy, for The people of the Indus civilization were engaged in a great deal of commerce, and there is proof of river and sea traffic. There was a trading post at Lothal on the Gulf of Cambay with a brick dockyard and an elaborate channel and spillway. Two-wheeled bullock carts and light , covered wagons—forms of transportation still common—were that remain common in the early 21st century—were used for local travel. Caravans of pack oxen were the principal mode of transportation over longer distances.

South India, centre of the later distinctive Tamil culture, constituted a second, initially independent agricultural region. Crops were being raised there during the first half of the 2nd 4th millennium BC BP. Two varieties of pulses (legumes) and finger millet (also called raggee) were cultivated there.

To the north and west of the Deccan Plateau plateau lay a third, intermediate area. There, at Lothal and Rangpur, has been found the earliest South Asian evidence of rice cultivation, in the later Harappan period. Subsequently, wheat, cotton, flax, and lentils spread into the region from the Indus Valleyvalley, and pulses and millets from the south.

In all three regions the basic cropping pattern of the 2nd 4th millennium BC BP, except the pattern for rice, continued into the 20th 21st century.

Early historic period

A fourth South Asian agricultural region developed during the 1st millennium BC in the Gangetic Valley. Waves of invading Indo-Aryan tribes presumably destroyed the Harappan cities and penetrated deep into Hindustān proper, the principal seat of the classical Indian civilization. With the Aryans came the , the Ganges River valley, became increasingly developed after about 3000 BP. Although it is clear that some of these changes arose from contact with Indo-European speaking peoples known as Aryans, notions of a devastating Aryan invasion are mistaken and in the past tended to obscure objective research on the region’s history.

Through various forms of exchange, the region saw the introduction of the horse, coinage, the Brāhmī Brahmi script, and the whole corpus of Vedic literaturetexts. Sources Written sources of information join the archaeological sources from this point are literary rather than archaeologicalonward. The plow, for example, figures in a hymn of the most ancient of the texts, the Rigveda: “Harness

Harness the plows, fit on the yokes, now that the womb of the earth is ready to sow the seed therein. . . . ”

Apparently, rice played an important role in the growth of population and the founding of new settlements. They These had spread eastward to the Ganges Delta by the 7th century BCdelta by about 2600 BP.

In the later Vedic texts (c. 1000–500 BC 3000–2500 BP) , there are repeated references to iron. Cultivation agricultural technology and practices, including iron implements; the cultivation of a wide range of cereals, vegetables, and fruits is described. Meat ; the use of meat and milk products were part of the diet; and animal husbandry was important. The Farmers plowed the soil was plowed several times. Seeds were broadcast. Fallowing and , broadcast seeds, and used a certain sequence of cropping were recommendedand fallowing. Cow dung provided the manure. Irrigation fertilizer, and irrigation was practiced where necessary.

A more secular eyewitness account is available from Megasthenes (c. 300 BC 2300 BP), a Greek envoy to the court of the Mauryan Empireempire. In his four-volume Indica, he wrote:

India has many huge mountains which abound in fruit-trees of every kind, and many vast plains of great fertilityfertility…. . . . The greater part of the soil, moreover, is under irrigation, and consequently bears two crops in the course of the yearyear…. . . . In addition to cereals, there grows throughout India much millet . . . and millet…and much pulse of different sorts, and rice also, and what is called bosporum [Indian millet].

And again,

Since there is a double rainfall [i.e., the two monsoons] in the course of each year . . . the year…the inhabitants of India almost always gather in two harvests annually.

Other sources reveal that the soils and seasons had been classified and meteorological observations of rainfall charted for the different regions of the Mauryan Empireempire, which comprised nearly the whole subcontinent and as well as territory to the northwest. A special department of the state supervised the construction and maintenance of the irrigation system. The best-known work of the period is the Sudarshana Lake in Kāthiāwār, created by an artificial dam and furnished with conduits. Roads, too, , including the dam and conduits at Sudarshana, a man-made lake on the Kathiawar Peninsula. Roads too were the government’s responsibility. The swifter horse-drawn chariot provided greater mobility than the bullock cart.

The Mughal century (c. 1600 CE)


The crops were empire was broadly divided into rice zones and wheat and millet zones. Rice predominated in the eastern states, on the southwest coast, and in Kashmir. Aside from its original home in GujarātGujarat, it had spread also to the Punjab and Sind Sindh with the aid of irrigation. Wheat grew throughout its “natural” region in north and central India. Millets were cultivated in the wheat areas and in the drier districts of Gujarāt Gujarat and Khāndesh Khandesh as well.

Cotton, sugarcane, indigo (Indigofera and Isatis species), and opium (Papaver somniferum) were major cash crops; the last two have since passed out of cultivation. Introduced . Cultivation of tobacco, introduced by the Portuguese, cultivation of tobacco spread rapidly. The Malabār Malabar Coast was the home of spices, especially black pepper (Piper nigrum), that had stimulated the first European adventures in the East. Coffee (Coffea species) had been imported from Abyssinia and became a popular beverage in aristocratic circles by the end of the century. Tea, which was to become the common man’s commoner’s drink and a major export, was yet undiscovered, though it was growing wild in the hills of Assam. Vegetables were cultivated mainly in the vicinity of towns. New species of fruit, such as the pineapple, papaya, and cashew nut (Anacardium occidentale), also were introduced by the Portuguese. The quality of mango and citrus fruits was greatly improved.

Cattle continued to be important for as draft animals and for milk. According to a Dutch observer, however, the cows gave far less milk than in his country. Land use never became as intensive as in China and the Far East Asia, although, as noted by Megasthenes, double (and even triple) cropping was fairly common in regions favoured with irrigation or adequate double rainfall. Though the population must have increased many times over since Mauryan times, in the 17th century virgin land was still abundant ; and peasants were scarce.

Irrigation from wells, tanks, and canals, however, had greatly expanded. Well water, surface water, and rainwater were captured and stored in tanks, then distributed across the landscape by a network of canals. Some new water-lifting devices—such as the sakia, or Persian wheel, which consisted consists of a series of leather buckets on an endless rope yoked to oxen—had been adopted and are still . All these practices continued to be widely used in the 21st century.



Operations of Into the 21st century, reaping, threshing, and winnowing have continued to be performed almost exactly as described in the Vedic texts. Thus, grain Grain is harvested with a sickle. It is , bound in bundles, and threshed by bullocks treading on it or by hand pounding. To separate the grain from the chaff, it is either may be sieved with sieves made of stalks of grass or of bamboo, or it is may be winnowed by pouring by hand at a height from a supa (winnowing scoop). The grain is then measured and stored. The sickle, sieve, and supa remain today as they were have remained essentially unchanged over more than two millennia ago.

Southeast and East Asia

The Chinese agrarian system could not conquer the northern steppes and deserts nor could it cultivate the barren heights of the Tibetan plateau to the west. It did reach out, however, to areas with less extreme environmental factors—to the plains of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, the lower valleys of eastern Tibet, and Chinese Turkistan, wherever conditions were favourable. It encountered no comparable barriers to the east. As a result, crops and cultivation techniques, especially of rice culture, spread to Korea and Japan, where they enjoyed notable success. Japan achieved higher yields per acre of rice than did China and most of the world.

Southeast Asia, on the other hand, constitutes an agricultural subcentre supplementing that of the Indian subcontinent. Though it has a wealth of tropical wild and cultivated flora, rice became the staple and predominantly subsistence crop of the region after its introduction probably by Indian colonists around the middle of the 1st millennium BC. Most of the other key farm products, such as sugar, tea, coffee, cotton, rubber, and corn, also were introduced to this area from the outside by the European colonizers.

Historically, shifting cultivation has been native to all the countries and still survives. As in South Asia, most of the rice is rain fed, and multiple cropping is infrequent, probably because of relatively low population densities in most of the region. With the exception of small pockets, as on the island of Java and in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, even wet-rice cultivation techniques have never been as intensive as in South China and Japan, nor have the yields been nearly as highAsia




Improvements in agriculture in the West: c. 200 BC BCE to AD 1600 CE
The Roman epoch: 200 BCE to 600 CE

Crop farming and domestication of animals were well established in western Europe by Roman times. Yields per acre were small by 20th21st-century standards, and nearly half the annual crop had to be used as seed, but quantities of grain were still exported from Britain to Gaul. Where feasible, Roman farming methods were adopted.

Greek and Roman farming techniques are known from contemporary textbooks that have survived. Methods were dictated to some degree by the Mediterranean climate and by the contours of the area. The majority of the crops cultivated today on the Mediterranean coastcoast—wheat, wheat, spelt, barley, some millet, and the legumes (, including beans, peas, vetches, chick-peasvetch, chickpeas (Cicer arietinum), alfalfa [lucerne](lucerne; Medicago sativa), and lupines (Lupinus species), were —were known at that time. The olive, the vine, Grapes, olives (Olea europaea), radishes (Raphanus sativus), turnips (Brassica species), and fruit trees were grown, as were turnips and radishes.

The farm

Roman holdings were commonly as small as 1 14 acres.25 acres (0.5 hectare); the ground was prepared with hand tools, hoes, and mattocks, doubtless edged with bronze or iron. Later, as farming developed , and estates of different sizes came into existence, two writers set out catalogs of the tools, implements, and labour required to exploit a given-size holding. These were Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 BC BCE) and Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC BCE). Already in Cato’s time, emphasis was on production of wine and oil for sale, rather than cultivation of cereal crops, beyond the volume required to feed animals and slaves.

For an olive grove of 240 jugers (150 acres; 60 hectares), Cato estimated necessary equipment as three large carts, six plows and plowshares, three yokes, six sets of ox harness, one harrow, manure hampers and baskets, three pack saddlespacksaddles, and three pads for the asses. Required tools included eight heavy spades, four smaller spades, shovels, rakes, scythes, axes, and wedges. Some 13 people, including an overseer, a housekeeper, five labourers, three teamsters, a muleteer, a swineherd, and a shepherd responsible for 100 sheep, would do the work. Other livestock included three yokes of oxen, three donkeys to carry manure, and one for the olive-crushing mill. The farm was also to be equipped with oil presses and containers for the oil.

Farm implements

Most Roman-era hand tools were similar in shape to their modern counterparts. The wooden plow was fitted with an iron share and, later, with a coulter (cutter). Though it had no moldboard to turn the soil over, it was sometimes fitted with two small ears that helped to make a more distinct rut. Though it could not turn a furrow, it could invert some of the soil if held sideways. It was usually followed by a man with a mattock who broke up clods and cleared the row so seed would fall into it. Two or three such plowings were given each year to land intended for cereals. Manure was spread only after the second plowing. If spread earlier, it would be buried too deep to do any good. The farm included a compost pit where human and animal excrement were placed along with leaves, weeds, and household waste. Water was added from time to time to rot the mass, and an oak pole was driven into the middle to keep snakes away. Various animal and bird droppings were believed to have different effects on growing plants. Pigeon’s dung was valued, but that of aquatic birds was avoided. Marl—earth containing lime, clay, and sand—was used in Gaul and possibly in Britain.

Seeds were sown by hand, broadcast, or dropped. They were covered with a harrow, which may have had iron teeth or may simply have been a thornbush. A more complex plow, fitted with a wheeled forecarriage, may have been used in Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy) as early as the 1st century AD CE. Traction normally was supplied by a pair of oxen; the Roman historian Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79 CE) mentions as many as eight being used on heavy land. In light soil, only one was necessary, and sometimes asses were used.

Cropping systems

Olive groves and vineyards were permanent; grain and pulses were annuals. Although it was realized that different soils were better suited to some crops than to others, the same piece of land was used for all crops. A specific crop, however, was grown in alternate years in what is known as the two-field, or crop-and-fallow, system. The fallow land was plowed two or three times during the fallow year to kill the weeds, which typically accumulate where cereal crops are continuously cultivated. Wetland was drained by digging V-shaped trenches, the bottom of which, usually four feet 4 feet (1.2 metres) deep, was paved with loose stones, willow branches, or bundles of brushwood placed lengthwise , and covered with the replaced soil. Soil was judged by colour, taste, smell, adhesion to the fingers when rubbed, and whether it filled up a hole from which it had been dug or proved too loose.

Then as now, wheat was mostly sown in autumn, though a species known as Triticum trimestre was sometimes planted in spring; it ripened in three months. Barley was a spring-sown crop, as were most others. Though the Romans knew that growing alfalfa and clover was in some way good for the succeeding crop, they did not know why. Similarly, a crop of lupines was sometimes planted for plowing in as green manure, and occasionally a crop of beans was used in the same way.

Harvesting and processing

The harvest was reaped with a curved sickle, a tool that has changed little since Roman times. In some places, the ears of grain were cut and carried in wicker baskets to the threshing floor. The straw was cut and stacked later. In other areas, the plant was cut lower down, and the grain was threshed from the straw. Another set of tools was used, consisting of a short-handled sickle held in the right hand, with the blade at right angles to the handle. A short-handled hooklike implement held in the left hand was used to draw together enough grain to be cut at one stroke. In Gaul , a reaper was used, a cart with an open back pushed by an animal reversed in the shafts. On the edge of the back, a comblike device was fixed to tear off the ears as the vehicle was pushed through the crop. The grain was threshed in the long-established way, by animals treading it on a firm floor, or by an implement known as a tribulum, a wooden framework with bits of flint or metal fixed to the underside, hauled over the grain by an animal. Winnowing was still done by tossing in the air from a winnowing basket when there was a favourable wind to blow away the chaff.

Grain was ground with a quern, a hand implement made of two stones, a concave base with a convex upper stone fitted into it. Some querns turned in a circle, while others merely rubbed up and down on the grain. Though designed before the end of the Roman period, water mills were uncommon.

Some forage crops were necessary to feed the plow animals and the cattle, sheep, and pigs. Grass was cut for hay, and many hours must have been spent in the woods collecting acorns for winterfeed winter feed for the swine. Alfalfa was the best fodder; it helped fertility as well. Lupines and a mixed crop of beans, vetch, and chick-peas chickpeas and another mixture of barley, vetch, and legumes were also employed. Turnips were grown for human and animal consumption in some regions, notably Gaul.

The methods of the Roman farmer produced only limited yields, and cereals were regularly imported to Italy from lands more naturally favourable to grain growing: Egypt, Sicily, Sardinia, and Gaul. Yet the Roman methods were basically sound and, with the help of modern mechanical aids, remain to a large extent in force today.


Little attempt was made at selective breeding, and little was possible, for most of the animals spent their time at open range or in the woods. Nevertheless, different breeds of cattle were recognized as native to particular places. They were bred between the ages of two 2 and 10 years; two 2 bulls to 60 or 70 cows was the usual proportion. Greek shepherds garbed some of the very fine-wooled sheep in skin coats to keep their fleece clean. Ewes were bred at three years old, two if essential. They fed on the stubble after harvest. Transhumance, or seasonal migration in search of pasture, was normal. A supply of clear water near the grazing ground was necessary. Goats were kept in large herds, with 50 to 100 being the optimum.

Swine were also important. Very fat animals were preferred, and large numbers of these, whose meat was frequently seen on the Roman table, were kept. Sows were covered (bred) at from 12 to 20 months of age; it was desirable for them to pig in July or August. The best proportion of boars to sows was 10 to 100. Herds of 100 to 150 ranged the woods. The bacon produced in Gaul had a reputation for quality; swine also flourished in northern Italy and eastern Spain.


In 1,000 years of medieval history, many details of farming in the Western world changed. The period falls into two divisions: the first, one of development, lasted until the end of the 13th century; the second, a time of recession, was followed by two centuries of recovery.

Agricultural advances

The most important agricultural advances took place in the countries north of the Alps, in spite of the large population changes and warfare that accompanied the great migrations and the later onslaughts of Northmen and Saracens. Agriculture had, of course, been practiced regularly in Gaul and Britain and sporadically elsewhere in Europe both before and during the Roman epoch. The climate and soils and, perhaps, the social organization compelled different arrangements of land division and the use of more-complex tools as more and more land farmland was reclaimed converted from forest, marsh, and heath to meet the needs of a rising population.

Open-field system

The precise origin of the open-field arrangement, which involves long scattered strips of arable land separated from each other by a furrow, balk (ridge of land left after plowing), or mere (boundary), is obscure. The earliest examples of this system date from about roughly 800, the year Charlemagne was crowned emperor of the West. Usually these strips of land, normally about one acre 1 acre (0.4 hectare) in size, were laid out in two or three large fields. Each farmer in the village worked a number of these acres; the units forming his holding were scattered among those of other men. The open-field system continued as more land was reclaimed and lasted for many centuries—longer, of course, in some places than in others. It has been suggested that the length of each strip was determined by the distance a draft animal, usually an ox, could haul a plow before stopping for a rest. The intermingling of the strips was said to have been the result of a jointly owned plow team and plow supplied by a number of farmers working together, each being allotted a strip in turn. A subsequent theory holds that in some places the division of fields, which may have originally been rectangular or square, among a number of heirs led to the creation of long, narrow acres. In theory each person’s holding totaled 30 acres (12 hectares), comprising strips equally divided among between the three arable fields. With the passage of time, wide variations in the size of holdings came about; many became very small.

Plows and plowing

Besides the different arrangement of the plowland, there were other changes, some of them important. Though Pliny the Elder claimed a wheeled plow was used in Cisalpine Gaul about the time of Christ, there is a good deal of doubt about thisthat. A wheeled asymmetrical plow was certainly in use in some parts of western Europe by the late 10th century. Illuminations of Illuminated manuscripts and somewhat later calendars a little later in date show a plow with two wheels fitted with a rudimentary moldboard and a coulter. This plow could invert the soil and turn a true furrow, thus making a better seedbed. Its use left high ridges on the land, traces of which can still be seen in some places.

The horse collar, which replaced the old harness band that pressed upon the animal’s windpipe, severely restricting its tractive power, was one of the most important inventions in the history of agriculture. Apparently invented in China, the rigid, padded horse collar allowed the animal to exert its full strength, enabling it to do heavier work, plowing as well as haulage. Many peasants continued to use oxen, however, because horses were more expensive to buy and to keep. Some plowing was done by two oxen as in former times; four, eight, or more were occasionally necessary in very difficult land.

Hand tools

Modifications, slight but important, had been introduced into the design of hand tools. A more effective ax made forest clearance easier and faster. The jointed flail supplanted the straight stick. The scythe was more frequently in use for mowing grass, reaping barley, and performing similar tasks. Wind power was applied to the grinding of grain by the earliest windmills. All these changes and adaptations helped expand the cultivated area and supply food for the growing population.

New lands and crops

Not only were forests cleared and heavy land cultivated, but, in the Netherlands, reclamation from marsh marshland and from the sea was extended. In the midst of the marshes, terps, Terps, artificially made patches of higher land on which houses and barns could be built, were made at a very early date in the midst of the marshes. Ditches to drain the fens were dug in the 10th century. Polders, land reclaimed from the sea, are first recorded in the 12th century.

In Spain , the Moors had introduced new crops and a new breed of sheep, the Merino, that was to make Spanish wool famous throughout Europe. New crops included sugarcane, rice, cotton, and some subtropical fruits, especially citrus. Grapevines and olive groves flourished in the south, as did the vines the Romans had introduced to the valleys of the Moselle and Rhine rivers. In the 12th century , Venice became a major cotton-manufacturing city, processing cotton from the Mediterranean area into cloth for sale in central Europe; and in the Middle Ages Germany . Germany also became a cotton-manufacturing centre in the Middle Ages.

Widespread expansion of farmed land occurred throughout western Europe between the 10th century and the later years of the 13th. German and Dutch settlers were encouraged to take up holdings eastward toward the Baltic countries and south to the Carpathians. In France, new villages were built and new farms carved out of the forest and the waste, while , in England , a great deal of land on the boundaries of the open fields was taken in and cultivated. All this new cultivation was carried out with the same old implements and tools; the same crops were cultivated and the same animals bred as before. In remote and desolate places, monastic organizations created great estates. These estates were formed to feed growing populations rather than to improve technical skills. A new literature of farming arose, directed to the attention of great lords and ecclesiastical magnates rather than to the illiterate majority of husbandmen. These bright prospects, however, were dimmed in the 14th century by a combination of calamities.

Agricultural recession

What is now called a recession began toward the end of the 13th century. The disasters of the 14th14th—climatic, climatic, pestilent, and military, followedmilitary—followed. Famine resulted from excessively bad weather in 1314, 1315, and 1316; a small recovery followed in 1317. Yields, never high (from six 6 to 10 bushels of wheat per acre ; [about 500 to 900 litres per hectare] and a little more for barley, rye, and oats), were reduced to nothing by the weather. Floods wiped out the reclaimed land in the Netherlands. Plague followed famine, bringing suffering to both animals and humans. The Black Death broke out in 1347 and is estimated to have killed approximately one-third of the population of Europe. Renewed outbreaks followed throughout the remainder of the century. The Hundred Years’ War desolated much of France; other conflicts, accompanied by similar pillage and destruction, broke out elsewhere. The result of all these misfortunes was to be seen in the landscape throughout western Europe. Much of the arable land could not be cultivated for lack of labourers; in some regions the countryside was inhabited by a few scattered peasants grubbing a scanty living in the grimmest isolation. Many of the newer settlements and some of the established ones were abandoned and became deserted villages.

The Netherlands

The Netherlands was not as seriously affected as most other countries. The flood destruction was repaired, and a system developed that was to become an example to all of Europe. Leguminous and root crops were introduced into the rotation at least as early as the 15th century, and long continuous rotations almost without fallow breaks were employed. Town refuse was added to the supplies of animal manure. The size and milk yield of the Dutch cattle became famous, though possibly exaggerated. Some say that they owed part of their distinction to crosses with animals from Lombardy and Piedmont, which also enjoyed a great reputation. Flemish horses were already renowned for size and strength.


In England, when agricultural recovery began in the 15th century, there was no immediate improvement in technique. During this period, England became known as the home of most medium- and long-wooled mutton breeds. The profits of the wool trade and, later, of the woolen manufacture induced landowners to increase the size of their flocks. This led to some difficulties. Not only had some arable land fallen down to rough grazing because of labour scarcity after the diseases and bad seasons of the 14th century, but the profit of wool encouraged enclosure of formerly open fields for grazing; some villages were even destroyed to increase the area of grazing land. Though there was a considerable outcry against enclosure in the 16th and early 17th centuries, the practice was too profitable to halt. At the same time, farmers began exchanging their scattered plots of land in order to consolidate individual holdings. These consolidated plots were then enclosed with a hedge or fence to prevent them from being subjected to the regulations that governed the use of the remaining strips. Land was also acquired by purchase for this purpose. None of these changes, however, involved any technological advances in farming.


In Spain , the shepherds, whose organization, the Mesta, was a powerful body with great political influence, came into conflict with the farmers. The annual journey of sheep from their northern grazing area to the south carried them along an established route; this route steadily broadened, with the sheep trespassing upon the farmers’ lands and consuming crops. At the same time, the Mesta successfully opposed any expansion in the amount of arable land until the mid-16th century.


In the 14th century the city-states of Italy were devoted to commerce. There was little emphasis on farming, though some attempts at draining marshes were made, and, in spite of the introduction of rice culture in the north, Italian farming on the whole remained much as it had been in Roman times. In the south great flocks were kept and moved up to the mountains for the summer along well-defined paths.


In the 15th century French farmers made substantial progress toward recovery, but even in France there was little advance in technology. The open-field system was prevalent in the north, and a type of Roman farming suited to the environment was practiced in the south, with alfalfa, clover, lupines, and other legumes grown for fodder and to maintain fertility. A fodder crop called Burgundy grass was grown in Burgundy toward the end of the 16th century.


Many of the German villages depopulated by the disasters of the 14th century were never resettled. Some of them had been established on marginal land, such as sandy heaths or places high in the mountains. By the middle of the 16th century, the advanced farming of the Netherlands penetrated into the north at the mouth of the Rhine and in Schleswig-Holstein. This is clear from one of the earliest printed books on farming, by Conrad Heresbach, a German, Conrad Heresbach. Heresbach described and recommended many of the methods used by the Romans, including raising lupines for green manure and rotating fallow-manured, winter-sown rape with wheat, rye, and spring barley. For the preparation of the seedbed, the destruction of weeds, manuring, sowing, and harvesting, implements that derived from the Roman pattern were used.

Heresbach’s book followed somewhat the pattern of Crescentius, who wrote in the 13th century, and in that respect was similar to the growing number of agricultural treatises that appeared in Spain and France. These were often encyclopaedias of rural life presumably intended for the landowning public. In the late 16th century, Henry IV of France and his minister, Sully, tried to stimulate interest among the lesser nobility in the management of their estates. In England, translations were made of continental works.

Crop-farming changes in western Europe: 1600–1800
The Norfolk four-course system

Of the many changes that took place during this period in agricultural history, few were more important than the Norfolk four-course system, characterized by the disappearance of the fallow year and by a new emphasis on fodder crops. The movement toward change was further intensified by the invention of new farm machines, improvements in farm implements, and scientific interest and new biological theories relating to farm and animal life.

In the Norfolk four-course system, wheat was grown in the first year, followed by turnips in the second, then barley, with clover and ryegrass undersown, in the third. The clover and ryegrass were grazed or cut for feed in the fourth year. The turnips were either employed for feeding cattle in open yards during the winter (some covered yards were built) or for feeding sheep confined in folds set up on the ground. This new system was cumulative in effect, for the fodder crops eaten by the livestock produced large supplies of previously scarce animal manure, and that was richer in nature because the animals were better fed. When the sheep grazed the fields, their urine and droppings fertilized the soil, so that heavier cereal yields were obtained in following years.

Established in Norfolk County, England, and in several other counties before the end of the 17th century, the Norfolk four-course system became fairly general on the newly enclosed farms by 1800, remaining almost standard practice on most British farms for the best part of the following century. The system was used in the Lothians and some other parts of Scotland by about 1800 and, during the first three quarters of the 19th century, was adopted in much of continental Europe.


In order to adopt the Norfolk four-course system, it was first necessary to alter the thousand-year-old layout of the arable fields. It was virtually impossible for an individual farmer to grow fodder crops on his strips of land in open fields, for at certain seasons (after harvest, for example) these fields were opened to grazing by the livestock of the whole community. The improving farmer, who grew clover and ryegrass or other legumes or a root crop, would simply have provided additional feed for his neighbours’ as well as his own animals. Such an arrangement was possible, of course, if all the farmers cooperated, a rather unlikely but not absolutely unknown state of affairs. On enclosed land, however, a farmer could cultivate these crops and benefit from his own efforts.

Consequently there was a rapid acceleration of the enclosure movement in England, sometimes by local agreement, by Chancery decree (late 17th century), and by private acts of Parliament in growing numbers (18th century). Some 6,000,000 acres of English fields were enclosed between 1700 and 1845. On the Continent, the change, where it was made, took place slightly later. Some farms are still worked in strips, though communal regulation has vanished.


Where new fodder crops were introduced into the rotation, more and better livestock were bred and kept. Animal size increased, and meat development was greater. In cows, milk yield improved. Better breeding increased fleece and flesh production in sheep and improved the size of pigs. Horses, essential to transport, were carefully bred. There were disastrous outbreaks of cattle plague, however, that spread throughout Europe in the second and fourth decades of the 18th century, possibly introduced from eastern Europe by cattle driven to markets in the west. As a result of these calamities, a veterinary school was founded at Lyon, in 1762, and a second at Alfort, Fr., in 1767. Denmark established its first veterinary school in 1773, and England followed in 1791.

An interesting aspect of livestock breeding was the admiration of all Europe for the Spanish Merino sheep (see photograph), which were forbidden from export for fear of competition. It proved impossible to maintain the prohibition. Merinos were obtained by Louis XVI of France in 1786. Some had been imported into Sweden even earlier, before 1765. Both Prussia and Saxony raised them by midcentury, the Saxon Merino becoming famous. Austria also secured Merinos, and George III of England obtained a few by the end of the century. Merinos were not a success in England, however.

Though a major source of meat since Roman times, pigs had been raised half wild, feeding in the woods under the care of a swineherd and his dogs. Over a large part of western Europe, this system continued, especially where open-field farming prevailed. In England, however, where population doubled during the 18th century from about 5,000,000 to about 10,000,000, more care was taken in breeding productive swine. Several different breeds could already be distinguished; some were crossed with Chinese animals possibly brought from that distant country in vessels carrying spices and tea.

Improvements in technology
Plows and farm machinery

Probably of Dutch origin, the Rotherham plow, the main design of which has remained virtually unchanged to this day, was first put into use in the Netherlands, England, and Scotland during the first half of the 18th century. Details of design varied from area to area. Some Rotherham plows were wheeled, and some were not; some were made of timber; others of iron. The first factory for making plows was established in England in 1783.

Though the problem of mechanizing harvest work was not solved until the 19th century, a few fairly simple threshing machines were designed and put in use by 1800. Similarly, a variety of machines for such tasks as preparing animal feed, chopping turnips, and cutting chaff were designed and used.

The English gentleman Jethro Tull made important contributions during this period, among them the horse-drawn hoe and the seed drill. To save expensive hand labour, Tull designed and fabricated horse-drawn hoes that destroyed the weeds and kept the soil between the rows in good crumbly (friable) condition. Tull believed that friable soil would supply all the nutrients a plant required, and he was so convinced of his theory that he planted wheat in rows spaced widely enough to allow for horse hoeing while the plant was growing. Tull also believed that placing the seed into the ground in small holes (drilling) would permit a much lighter rate of seeding than hand broadcast methods and still get high yields. To place the seeds, he designed and used a seed drill.

Tull was not the first man to invent a seed drill. A seed dropper, consisting of a tube attached to a plow through which seed could be dropped by hand at regular intervals, had been attached to an ancient Babylonian plow. A similar system, but with two tubes behind two plowshares set in a rectangular frame, was employed in 17th-century China, and probably at a very much earlier date. An Italian described a modern form of seed drill in the late 16th century. An Austrian, Locatelli, described a sembrador, or seed drill attached to a plow, which was either used or proposed for use in Spain. After Tull, inventors were numerous, and, at the end of the 18th century, the drilling of seed, though not commonplace, was accepted. Throughout this period, however, the ordinary farmer continued to prepare his seedbed by plowing three times a year, occasionally more, and broadcasting seed by hand and harrowing it in. All these techniques were thousands of years old.

Irrigation and drainage

Walter Blith, a captain in Cromwell’s army, was interested in land drainage and irrigation in the form of water meadows, pieces of low, flat land capable of being kept in fertility by being overflowed from some adjoining stream. During his lifetime considerable drainage work was carried out in eastern England, where it has continued to the present day. At the same time, water meadows were constructed in southwest England. This system was well known and of long standing in Germany. Similarly, there were sporadic attempts to drain wetlands in France and Italy; maintenance of the drainage system was essential to parts of the Netherlands. Colonization of reclaimed lands in eastern England by Dutch settlers also introduced some novel crops to that area, especially rape and cole.

Importance of the New World

The age of exploration that began in the mid-15th century led to discovery of edible plants previously unknown to Europeans. The Arabs had introduced sugarcane and rice to some parts of southern Europe. The voyagers to North America returned with corn (maize), tobacco, and the turkey. South America supplied the potato, cocoa, quinine, and some vegetable drugs, while coffee, tea, and indigo came from the Orient.

Though the tropical plants could not be cultivated in the temperate European climate, corn was rapidly adopted in southern Europe. Imported first to Ireland, the potato came into general use elsewhere by the end of the 18th century.

These novel crops expanded the dietary range in some places, and importation of the new beverages may have helped reduce the very large consumption of alcoholic drinks. Tea drinking was regarded as harmful by some fervent propagandists at the end of the 17th century and later, and, in the 1820s, William Cobbett even condemned the potato. By that time, however, the crop had become the staple food of the Irish rural population and was raised on a moderate scale in Lancashire and Cheshire for consumption by their growing manufacturing population, as it was in some parts of Germany, France, the Low Countries, and Italy.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the introduction of sheep into such New World countries as Argentina, with suitable climate and grazing land, proved highly successful.

Agricultural textbooks and improvement societies

The small number of vernacular farming textbooks printed in Europe during the 16th century increased in the 17th and became much larger in the 18th, indicating a developing interest in commercial farming. Population growth, especially in the urban centres, and the rise of industry opened new opportunities for the enterprising landlord and farmer, even though transport was difficult. English writers on farming were more numerous than those in other countries. The French paid more attention to gardening, and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) brought a long interruption in agricultural development in Germany and adjacent countries.

The Flemish and Dutch produced no agricultural texts, declaring that they were more interested in farming than in writing about it. Indeed, the system of crop rotation in Brabant and Flanders became the pattern for the rest of Europe. In 1645 an Englishman, Sir Richard Weston, wrote the first description of this system, which featured crops such as clover or roots, rotating with industrial crops such as flax, with no fallow break. Adoption in England and other parts of western Europe increased agricultural production between 1600 and 1800.

The problem of educating the ordinary farmer occupied the minds of improving landlords who were the governing class in every European country. Improvement societies formed in Great Britain, and a semiofficial Board of Agriculture, financed in part by a government grant, was established there in 1793. It lasted until 1822. One of the first tasks it undertook was to make and publish a survey of each county in the kingdom in order to make the best local methods known to other districts. A similar plan had been tried in France in 1759. Other countries in western Europe engaged in similar activities. A Royal Society was established in Denmark in 1769 and made practical researches. The Italian Società di Georgofili, founded in 1753, tried to stimulate technical improvement and planned large drainage schemes. The first similar Swiss society was established at Zürich in 1747. Frederick William I of Germany founded an agricultural school at Halle in 1727; and the first agricultural high school was begun, with royal encouragement, at Möglin, near Berlin, in 1806.

Progress in different countries

Although Italy was the first country where a four-course rotation was advocated, traditional farming persisted there into the 18th century and even later. Italian farmers, however, had accepted corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco and relied upon these and other subtropical products for subsistence and sale. The vine continued to be important, as did the olive. The north was more advanced than the less fertile south; a wide variety of crops was grown there, often in long rotations with a reduction of the proportion of fallow. An occasional fodder crop of turnips, clover, and ryegrass was cultivated. Shortages of fodder encouraged adoption of the Norfolk four-course system. Plows and other implements, however, remained primitive. The mulberry tree, the leaves of which provided food for silkworms, was important in the Milanese and Piedmont area. Rice was also grown on irrigated land in that area. High-yielding milch cows were also kept. Transhumance was practiced, with sheep on the lower lands in winter and on the mountain pastures in summer.


Spain remained backward, partly because of its physical and climatic conditions and partly from social pressure. The Merino sheep, fine horses, and mules continued to deserve their high repute. Some subtropical crops were cultivated in the south and east—sugarcane, cotton, grapes, olives, figs, raisins, and oranges—but the arid and stony land of the centre and elsewhere remained substantially unproductive and thinly populated by a poor class of métayers (sharecroppers).


The Industrial Revolution in Great Britain drew many people from food production; this had happened before in the mercantile and manufacturing Low Countries. Since these people still had to be fed, there existed a strong incentive toward increased farm productivity. These countries could not, however, satisfy local demands, and they sought to import food, especially grain. Thus, industrialization in England stimulated cereal growing in Prussia, Poland, and parts of Russia.


Increased grain production in Prussia was also stimulated by the personal efforts of Frederick II the Great, who set out to repair some of the damage caused by the Thirty Years’ War and generally to improve conditions in his country. He ordered the rearrangement of the open-field farms into separate enclosed holdings and did away with common grazing, doubtless to encourage better animal selection and breeding. He bred horses for the army and gave bulls and rams to favoured landowners. Elsewhere in the German congeries of small states, the princes enforced improvements by royal edicts. Fodder crops were introduced. In addition to keeping the animals indoors in winter, summer stall feeding was introduced in some areas, resulting in preservation of the animal manure formerly dropped on the commons.

Sugar beets had been grown for feed in Germany, but it was not until 1747 that sugar was successfully extracted and not until 1802 that the first factory for making beet sugar was built. This industry, however, did not really begin to grow until the time of the Napoleonic Wars.


The countries of Scandinavia were influenced by the spirit of improvement, but less spectacularly. Danish farmers were somewhat hindered in the introduction of novel methods by political restrictions, and it was not until the end of the 19th century that serious advances in technique took place. Sweden had some improvers who imported Merino sheep, English cattle, and Angora goats and who studied plow design. Nevertheless, Swedish farming in general remained almost static until after 1757, when some exchange of strips made enclosed farms possible. Potatoes became a staple.

North America

Changes in farming technique that increased productivity, introduced primarily in Great Britain and the Netherlands before 1800, made British farming the example to the world, even the distant lands of America. That continent, north and south, had indeed supplied Europe with very valuable plants. By the end of the 18th century, the production of North America was sufficient to supply some of the necessities of a warring Europe. The New England settlements, like those of the Southern states, were expanding toward the west, as land was claimed from the forest. Agriculture produced small surpluses for export. The Southern states had, of course, always exported staples like tobacco, cotton, and (Louisiana) sugar; but the processes by which these plants were cultivated remained primitive.

Cattle raising expanded rapidly in the New World. The need for fresh and larger grazing areas drew cattle farming west into Ohio and Kentucky, where corn for fattening purposes could be raised at low cost. Cattle were being driven overland to seaboard markets by 1805.

The 19th-century power revolution on the farm: c. 1792–1914

The development of agriculture between the close of the 18th century and the early years of the 20th century was characterized by the partial mechanization of agriculture in western Europe—especially in Great Britain—and in the previously untapped lands of Australia, New Zealand, and North America, where wild, uncultivated, and virtually unoccupied land was made to yield vast quantities of plant and animal crops.


Though the first steps had been taken earlier, it was not until after 1850 that mechanization took hold in western Europe and the newly settled countries. A variety of machines were slowly coming into use when the French revolutionary wars broke out in the 1790s. An efficient seed drill had been devised but still required demonstration in the 1830s to convince farmers of its value. A few threshing machines were in use before 1800, and they became steadily more popular until, in the 1830s, farm labourers in England rebelled against them because the machine robbed them of their winter employment. The speed with which the thresher was adopted is rather surprising, as there was a surplus rather than a shortage of labour at the time.

The reaper

Yet even an ample supply of labour could not always cope with the harvest by hand methods. Local labour frequently had to be supplemented by traveling gangs or by small tradesmen from neighbouring towns. This unsatisfactory situation proved an incentive to invention. Reaping machines had been proposed before, but not until Patrick Bell in Scotland and Cyrus Hall McCormick in the United States produced their designs did this machine became a practical reality. After the Great Exhibition of London in 1851, the reaper slowly came into general use. About this time an animal-pushed combine harvester, which stripped the grain from the plant like the Gallo-Roman reaper of classical times, was devised. This machine was used successfully in South Australia, where more grain was grown than could be harvested manually by the few labourers available there.

Plows and plowing

Before harvesting machines could be used, however, the ground had to be prepared, and the fundamental instrument for this purpose was the plow. Though attempts had been made in the 17th and 18th centuries to develop a mathematical theory of plow design, in a less esoteric way practical men had made significant improvements. Prominent among these was the English inventor Robert Ransome, who patented a cast-iron share in 1785 and a self-sharpening share in 1803. Later he designed a plow with standard parts that could be removed and replaced in the field, a double plow (i.e., with two shares), and other patterns.

As settlers in the United States moved westward, plowing of the black prairie soils, high in organic matter, posed a special problem to the farmers who had cast-iron and iron-patched plows. The ingenuity of John Deere, an Illinois blacksmith and plow maker of the 1830s, resulted in a new kind of plow that was made entirely of steel except for the braces, beam, and handles. The one-piece share and moldboard of his first steel plow was cut from a mill-saw blade and shaped over a wooden form. This greatly improved implement not only made possible the effective plowing of the black prairie soils but also considerably lessened the animal power needed to turn the soil.

A mole plow, characterized by a cartridge-shaped “mole” attached to the bottom of its wide cutting blade, and intended for plowing a drain in heavy wetland, was successfully fabricated and used in the late 18th century. The plow, pulled by a capstan or team of animals, was a great help in draining wetlands. Invention of a method for manufacturing tubular clay pipes also aided and simplified drainage. Use of these pipes spread rapidly beginning about 1850; large areas of land were thus drained all over Europe. Drainage by this method continues today.

Steam-powered equipment

The first attempts at steam-powered plowing took place in the 1830s. Though ingenious, the early apparatus was impractically heavy and cumbersome. A successful steam plow was made in the 1860s, after which steam power was widely adopted, especially on large farms (see photograph). Supplementary implements helpful to the farmer were also produced about this time. They include hay rakes, hay-loaders, and potato spinners. Barn machinery, housed in specially designed buildings, was driven by a steam engine through a system of belts and pulleys or in more primitive style by horses. Threshing drums and supplementary machines were often hauled about the countryside by steam traction engines and worked on a contract basis by itinerant gangs of agricultural labourers.

Steam power spread rapidly but thinly over Europe. The first steam plow was worked in The Netherlands in 1862. Though milking machines were built, they were not really successful until the end of the century. The cream separator and milk cooler, both little changed since the time of their invention, were introduced in the 1880s.

Progress in mechanization in the second half of the 19th century was not, of course, confined to agriculture. Transport and communications improved enormously. Steamships facilitated the movement of goods and the spread of ideas. Railroads were built throughout the world, making agriculture possible in areas where farmers previously had no way to carry their goods to market. The first shipment of cattle marketed by rail originated in Lexington, Ky., in 1852. These cattle were driven to Cincinnati, Ohio, freighted to Cleveland on Lake Erie, boated to Buffalo, freighted to Albany, N.Y., and then boated down the Hudson River to New York City. By 1860 railroads had extended beyond the Mississippi River, opening the Southwest to range production and the Midwest to cattle feeding.

Applying science to farming
New fertilizers

Mechanical developments were paralleled by scientific discovery. Research in plant physiology and nutrition begun in the 18th century continued and grew in scope. The brilliant English chemist Sir Humphry Davy summarized the current state of agricultural knowledge in a series of lectures published as Elements of Agricultural Chemistry in 1813. Though Davy’s lectures probably had little impact on the ordinary farmer, a few enterprising pioneers were soon conducting field experiments with new fertilizers. The beneficial effects of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) had been known since the 17th century. When a firm began to import saltpetre from India in the 1820s, interested farmers bought and used it. Imported Chilean nitrate of soda was more plentiful, however, and more often used. Peruvian guano, an organic fertilizer, was imported and extensively used, even though sellers often diluted it with useless material to increase its bulk. Ground bones and other kinds of waste had been used in the late 18th century for restoring phosphate to pastures in dairy areas. Perhaps it was the use of these bones and their cracking and soaking in sulfuric acid that led to the production of superphosphate of lime in the 1840s. As the 19th century continued, more mineral fertilizers were discovered and marketed. With the development of the chemical industry, other fertilizers were manufactured. Basic slag, a waste product of the iron industry, was applied to grasslands with success. Gypsum was also tried but was later superseded by more effective products.

Agricultural research and education

Scientists of the 18th century had established the principles that governed plant life. About 1837 the English agriculturist Sir John Bennet Lawes began to experiment with the effects of manures on plants and crops. In 1842 he patented a process for treating phosphate rock to produce superphosphate and thus initiated the synthetic fertilizer industry. In the following year Lawes enlisted the services of the English scientist J.H. (later Sir Henry) Gilbert, with whom he worked for more than half a century, performing experiments on crop and animal nutrition. The work of Rothamsted Experimental Station, which Lawes founded and endowed, became world renowned. At the same time, similar work was carried out in France, Germany, and the United States.

Though a considerable number of books on agricultural subjects appeared during the 19th century, their effect was perhaps less than that of the measures taken to promote agricultural education in most European countries. Though schools for farmers had been established in some German states in the 18th century, the first professorships of rural agriculture and economy were established at Oxford (1790) and Edinburgh (1797). Though similar events took place in France and Germany in the 19th century, a key date in the history of agricultural research and education is 1862, when the U.S. Congress set up the Department of Agriculture and provided for colleges of agricultural and mechanical arts in each state.


An important spur to research was the great prevalence of plant disease, which at intervals became epidemic. Two crops—the potato and the grapevine—were virulently attacked in the 1840s, and irreparable damage resulted. When the potato blight struck Ireland, where the potato was a staple food crop, it caused widespread famine. The vine growers of southern Europe suffered several disastrous epidemics of the vine fungus. Later in the century, infestation by the vine louse grape phylloxera nearly put an end to European viticulture.

Farming outside Europe
European colonies

In the 19th century, European colonial expansion and plantation farming spread to many areas of the world. Coffee was grown widely in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) until disease destroyed the plants and they were replaced by tea bushes. Sugarcane was raised on a large scale in the East and West Indies, in the United States, and the Hawaiian Islands. Cocoa was carried from South America to colonies in West Africa, where it prospered. Natural rubber was tapped in the Congo region and Brazil and was later cultivated in well-designed plantations in the Malay Peninsula. Palm oil was collected from trees in West Africa and the South Seas. Yet these spectacular developments had little impact on the native agriculture of the underdeveloped regions in general; ancient patterns of cultivation remained largely unchanged.

America and Australia

By 1900 much of the western United States had been settled; great livestock ranches and wheat farms had been established there and in Argentina. A large dairy and sheep industry had grown up in Australia and New Zealand. Imported Merinos were the foundation stock of the vast flocks that grazed the Australian hinterland. Devon cattle were exported from England to South Africa, where sheep were also a significant economic factor.

The Great Plains of the United States, lying between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, were first used by the open-range cattle industry, the heyday of which lasted from about 1866 to 1886. To improve their lean, lanky longhorn, breeders imported Herefords, Durham Shorthorns, and other fine European cattle. As the range became more and more heavily occupied, and as wheat farmers began to till the soil of the Great Plains, it became necessary to put up fences. This was accomplished with a remarkable invention, barbed wire, a new, cheap, and rapidly erected kind of fencing, used in preference to the post and rail fences or the sod and stone walls that had been common in Europe for centuries.

Grain farmers rapidly followed the ranchers, and farming spread from Oklahoma north into Canada. Because hand labour was scarce, cultivation and harvesting were rapidly mechanized. A combine harvester hauled by a large team of mules was used in California in the late 1880s. Different from the combine harvester used in South Australia, this was a prototype of today’s machine. Iron and steel plows were produced in large numbers, and steam traction engines were used as power units for many mechanized operations such as threshing. Though seed was usually drilled, yields were often low because manure was in short supply. Furthermore, with manure scarce, a three-year rotation was practiced to prevent soil depletion: two crop plantings were followed by a fallow year. In the Southern states, export staples were produced in addition to subsistence crops.

America’s prodigious new supplies of meat and grain were generally exported from the wide ranges of the Western states to the more populous Eastern states and to Europe, where they lowered prices paid to European farmers but played an important role in feeding populations in industrial centres. Fresh meat and dairy produce from Argentina and Australia were carried thousands of miles in newly developed refrigerator ships.

The huge quantities of inexpensive food produced by the newly settled countries created a difficult problem for the European farmer. The arable and mixed farming common in most European countries simply could not compete. In Great Britain, much cropland was planted with grass, and farmers began to raise pedigree animals and dairy produce. On the Continent, where many farmers occupied peasant holdings, a kind of subsistence farming continued. Denmark and The Netherlands turned to production of dairy produce and high-quality bacon, feeding pigs on waste dairy materials.

Scientific agriculture: the 20th century

Agricultural technology has developed more rapidly in the 20th century than in all previous history. Though the most important developments during the first half of this century took place in the industrial countries, especially the United States, the picture has changed somewhat since the 1950s. With the coming of independence, former colonies in Africa and Asia have initiated large-scale efforts to improve their agriculture. In many cases they have used considerable ingenuity in adapting Western methods to their own climates, soils, and crops (see also agricultural technology).

Developments in power: the internal-combustion engine


The tractor



Unit machinery

Since World War II, there has been an increase in the use of self-propelled machines in which the motive power and the equipment for performing a particular task form one unit. Though the grain combine is the most important of these single-unit machines, self-propelled units are also in use for spraying, picking cotton, baling hay, picking corn, and harvesting tomatoes, lettuce, sugar beets, and many other crops. These machines are faster, easier to operate, and above all, have lower labour requirements than those that are powered by a separate tractor.

Grain combine


Mechanized equipment for corn

Corn, the most important single crop in the United States and extremely important in many other countries, is grown commercially with the aid of equipment operated by tractors or by internal-combustion engines mounted on the machines. Corn pickers came into use in the U.S. Corn Belt after World War I and have been even more widely adopted since World War II. Corn pickers vary in complexity from the snapper-type harvester, which removes the ears from the stalks but does not husk them, to the picker-sheller, which not only removes the husk but shells the grain from the ear. The latter is often used in conjunction with dryers. Modern machines can harvest as many as 12 rows of corn at a time.

Mechanized equipment for cotton


Tomato-harvesting equipment


Automobiles, trucks, and airplanes





New crops and techniques


New crops

The soybean. This is an outstanding example of an ages-old crop that, because of the development of new processes to make its oil and meal more useful, is widely produced today. In the Orient, where the soybean originated long ago, more than half the crop is used directly for food, and less than a third is pressed for oil. Its high protein and fat content make it a staple in the diet, replacing or supplementing meat for millions of people.





Just as the soybean was used for many centuries in Asia before its introduction into the Western world, so sorghum was a major crop in Africa. Sorghum is fifth in importance among the world’s cereals, coming after wheat, rice, corn, and barley. It is called Guinea corn in West Africa, kafir corn in South Africa, durra in The Sudan, and mtama in East Africa. In India it is known as jowar, cholam, and great millet, and it is called kaoliang in China. In America it is often called milo, while the sweet-stemmed varieties are referred to as sweet sorghum, or sorgo.

Sorghum probably had been domesticated in Ethiopia by 3000 BC. From there, it spread to West and East Africa, and then southward. Traders from Africa to the East carried sorghum as provisions on their dhows. It is likely that sorghum thus reached India, where cultivation began between 1500 and 1000 BC. Other traders carried sorghum to China and the Far East. The amber sorghums or sorgos, useful for forage and syrup, may have moved by sea, while the grain sorghums probably moved overland. The movement to the Mediterranean and the Middle East also began through traders.




The sugar beet






New techniques






The usefulness of a full-scale conservation project is seen in the Snowy Mountains Project of Australia, where three river systems have been diverted to convert hundreds of miles of arid but fertile plains to productive land. Intensive soil conservation methods have been undertaken wherever the natural vegetation and soil surface have been disturbed. Drainage is controlled by stone and steel drains, grassed waterways, absorption and contour terraces, and settling ponds. Steep slopes are stabilized by woven wickerwork fences, brush matting, and bitumen sprays, followed by revegetation with white clover and willow and poplar trees. Grazing is strictly controlled to prevent silting of the reservoirs and damage to slopes. The two main products of the plan are power for new industries and irrigation water for agriculture, with recreation and a tourist industry as important by-products.





Dry farming



The direction of change


New strains: genetics


Early work in genetics


By the time Mendel’s work was again brought to light, the science of genetics was in its first stages of development. The word genetics comes from “genes,” the name given to the minute quantities of living matter that transmit characteristics from parent to offspring. By 1903, scientists in the United States and Germany had concluded that genes are carried in the chromosomes, nuclear structures visible under the microscope. In 1911 a theory that the genes are arranged in a linear file on the chromosomes and that changes in this conformation are reflected in changes in heredity was announced.

Genes are highly stable. During the processes of sexual reproduction, however, means are present for assortment, segregation, and recombination of genetic factors. Thus, tremendous genetic variability is provided within a species. This variability makes possible the changes that man can bring about within a species to adapt it to his specific uses. Occasional mutations (spontaneous changes) of genes also contribute to variability.





Darwin’s work was studied by a young American botanist, William James Beal, who probably made the first controlled crosses between varieties of corn for the sole purpose of increasing yields through hybrid vigour. Beal worked successfully without knowledge of the genetic principle involved. In 1908 George Harrison Shull concluded that self-fertilization tended to separate and purify strains while weakening the plants but that vigour could be restored by crossbreeding the inbred strains. Another scientist found that inbreeding could increase the protein content of corn, but with a marked decline in yield. With knowledge of inbreeding and hybridization at hand, there was yet to be developed a technique whereby hybrid corn with the desired characteristics of the inbred lines and hybrid vigour could be combined in a practical manner. In 1917 Donald F. Jones of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station discovered the answer, the “double cross.”



Many Midwestern farmers began growing hybrid corn in the late 1920s and 1930s, but it did not dominate corn production until World War II. In 1933, 1 percent of the total corn acreage was planted with hybrid seed. By 1939 the figure was 15 percent, and in 1946 it rose to 69. The percentage was 96 in 1960. The average per acre yield of corn rose from 23 bushels (2,000 litres per hectare) in 1933, to 83 bushels (7,220 litres per hectare) by 1980.

The techniques used in breeding hybrid corn have been successfully applied to grain sorghum and several other crops. New strains of most major crops are developed through plant introductions, crossbreeding, and selection, however, because hybridization in the sense used with corn and grain sorghums has not been successful.








The Green Revolution


Genetic engineering

The application of genetics to agriculture since World War II has resulted in substantial increases in the production of many crops. This has been most notable in hybrid strains of corn and grain sorghum. At the same time, crossbreeding has resulted in much more productive strains of wheat and rice. Called artificial selection, or selective breeding, these techniques have become aspects of a larger field called genetic engineering. Of particular interest to plant breeders has been the development of techniques for deliberately altering the functions of genes by manipulating the recombination of DNA. This has made it possible for researchers to concentrate on creating plants that possess attributes—such as the ability to use free nitrogen or to resist diseases—that they did not have naturally.

Animal breeding












Beef cattle





Artificial breeding



In summary, crossbreeding and careful selection, combined with such techniques as artificial insemination, better feeding, and control of diseases and pests, have made substantial contributions to livestock production in the 20th century. More intensified research, particularly in hybridization, offers promise of help to livestock producers in meeting increasing world demands for their products.

Electricity in agriculture


Electrical cooperatives



From these small beginnings the progress of rural electrification, though necessarily slow, steadily gained impetus until, in the 1920s, public opinion eventually compelled governments to consider the development of rural electrification on a national basis. Today in the most advanced countries virtually all rural premises—domestic, commercial, industrial, and farms—have an adequate supply of electricity.




Modern applications





Pest and disease control in crops
Beginnings of pest control

Wherever agriculture has been practiced, pests have attacked, destroying part or even all of the crop. In modern usage, the term pest includes animals (mostly insects), fungi, plants, bacteria, and viruses. Man’s efforts to control pests have a long history. Even in Neolithic times (about 7000 BC), farmers practiced a crude form of biological pest control involving the more or less unconscious selection of seed from resistant plants. Severe locust attacks in the Nile Valley during the 13th century BC are dramatically described in the Bible, and, in his Natural History, the Roman author Pliny the Elder describes picking insects by hand from plants and spraying. The scientific study of pests was not undertaken until the 17th and 18th centuries. The first successful large-scale conquest of a pest by chemical means was the control of the vine powdery mildew (Unciluna necator) in Europe in the 1840s. The disease, brought from the New World, was controlled first by spraying with lime sulfur and, subsequently, by sulfur dusting.





Pesticides as a panacea: 1942–62






Integrated control





Economics, politics, and agriculture

















Origins of agriculture and early agriculture societies

Sir Joseph Hutchinson (ed.), Essays on Crop Plant Evolution (1965); and Peter J. Ucko and G.W. Dimbleby (eds.), The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals (1969), are collections of papers on the origins of agriculture; E.S. Higgs (ed.), Papers in Economic Prehistory (1972), and Palaeoeconomy (1975), contain a reconsideration of theories on the origins of agriculture and some results of modern research; David Rindos, The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective (1984), concentrates on the history of man’s effort to domesticate plants; J. Desmond Clark and Steven A. Brandt (eds.), From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences of Food Production in Africa (1984), analyzes economic changes in prehistoric society; Graeme Barker, Prehistoric Farming in Europe (1985), gives an account of the evolution of farming after the Ice Age.

Continental works.

Origins of agriculture and early agricultural societies

A.B. Gebauer and T.D. Price (eds.), Transitions to Agriculture in Prehistory (1992); and T.D. Price and A.B. Gebauer (eds.), Last Hunters, First Farmers: New Perspectives on the Prehistoric Transition to Agriculture (1995), are overviews of events leading to agriculture around the world. B.D. Smith, The Emergence of Agriculture (1995), is an integrated overview of research methods, theoretical considerations, and archaeological sites pertinent to the development of agriculture. M. Woods and M.B. Woods, Ancient Agriculture: From Foraging to Farming (2000), discusses agricultural technology in various cultures from the Stone Age to 476 CE, including China, Egypt, Mesoamerica, and Greece. David Rindos, The Origins of Agriculture: An Evolutionary Perspective (1984), concentrates on agriculture as a natural biological process not unique to people; J. Desmond Clark and Steven A. Brandt (eds.), From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences of Food Production in Africa (1984), analyzes economic changes in prehistoric society; T.D. Price, Europe’s First Farmers (2000), gives an account of the development of farming in Europe. D.R. Piperno and D.M. Pearsall, The Origins of Agriculture in the Lowland Neotropics (1998), is the first assessment of the history and significance of tropical lowland agriculture in the Americas. Two excellent volumes that consider the designation of a fourth agricultural regime in North America are Douglas Deur and Nancy J. Turner (eds.), Keeping it Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest Coast of North America (2005); and Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (2005).

Yoshinori Yasuda, The Origins of Pottery and Agriculture (2002), explores developments in East Asia and emphasizes rice cultivation and early pottery. Peter S. Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies (2005), assesses the beginning and diffusion of agriculture around the world. C.Wesley Cowan, Patty Jo Watson, and Nancy L. Benco, The Origins of Agriculture: An International Perspective, new ed. (2006), is a region-by-region review of current data, particularly plant and animal remains from archaeological sites. Sue Colledge and James Conolly, The Origins and Spread of Domestic Plants in Southwest Asia and Europe (2007), collects original articles on early agriculture in those regions. John E. Staller, Robert H. Tyko, and Bruce F. Benz (eds.), Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize (2006), compiles the best available information on Zea mays.

Agriculture in ancient Asia

Hiuen Tsiang, Si-yu-ki: Buddhist Records of the Western World, 2 vol., trans. by Samuel Beal (1884, reprinted 1981), offers travel accounts of early Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to India in the 1st millennium, including those of Shih Fa-hian, Sung YünShi Fahian, Song Yun, and Hiuen Tsiang; Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, The Economic History of China (1921, reprinted 1969), is a history of Chinese agriculture with emphasis on soil depletion; Kwang-Chih Chang, The Archaeology of Ancient China, 3rd 4th rev. ed. (19771986), is a modern text interpreting prehistoric and protohistoric archaeological evidence in the historical framework of cultural development until 221 BC BCE (illustrated, with bibliography); Ping-Ti-Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (1959, reprinted 1967), is a scholarly study of population growth and of interacting variables, such as migrations, land utilization and tenure, and food-production techniques, with extensive data tables, bibliography, and notes; N.I. Vavilov, The Origin, Variation, Immunity, and Breeding of Cultivated Plants (1951), presents selected writings of Vavilov, one of the world’s outstanding contributors to the theory of genetics, plant breeding, and study of plant variation, systematics, and evolution (illustrated, with selected bibliography); V. Gordon Childe, New Light on the Most Ancient East, 4th ed. (1952, reprinted 1969), is an excellent introduction to the Indus Valley Civilization in comparison with the prehistories of Egypt and Mesopotamia—from the Nile to the Indus (illustrated, with bibliography); Bridget and Raymond Allchin, The Birth of Indian Civilization (1968), is a useful general history from the Early Stone Age until 550 BC (maps, plates, list of radioactive carbon dates, and bibliography); see also J.W. McCrindle, McCrindle’s Ancient India: As Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (1877, reissued 1984); Ifran Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707) (1963), is an informative text that covers cultivation techniques, crops, land tenure, village communities, and revenue administration; and Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (1983), is a systematic, informative overview.

Agriculture in the West Europe from 200 BC BCE to AD 19001600 CE

G.E. Fussell, Farming Technique from Prehistoric to Modern Times (1966), is a general review of the history of agricultural tools and techniques, with many illustrations and an extensive bibliography; David Grigg, The Dynamics of Agricultural Change (1982), is a survey of historical sources. Jean Philippe Lévy, The Economic Life of the Ancient World (1967; originally published in French, 1964), describes the various economies of the Greco-Oriental world in the time before Alexander, during the Hellenistic Age, in the early Roman Empire, and also in the later Roman Empire; Fritz M. Heichelheim, An Ancient Economic History, rev. ed., 3 vol. (1958–70; originally published in German, 1938), contains extensive and detailed information on ancient agriculture; see also standard editions of such classical Classical authors as Cato, Columella, Hesiod, Pliny, Varro, and Xenophon. Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (1968, reprinted 1976; originally published in French, 1962), is a classic work on agriculture from the 9th to 15th centuries; see also the 15th century. Also useful are Robert Latouche, The Birth of Western Economy, 2nd ed. (1967, reprinted 1981; originally published in French, 1956); Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962, reissued 1980); B.H. Slicher Van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, AD 500–1850 (1963; originally published in Dutch, 1960); Wilhelm Abel, Geschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft vom frühen Mittelalter bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, 3rd rev. ed. (1978); Raymond Gromas, Histoire agricole de la France (1947); and Marc Bloch, French Rural History (1966; originally published in French, 1952–56); and Paul Lindemans, Geschiedenis van de Landbouw in Belgie, 2 vol. (1952). Christabel S. Orwin and Edith H. Whetham, History of British Agriculture, 1846–1914, 2nd ed. (1971), deals with agricultural policy, social change, and technical and scientific developments during this period in England; Lord Ernle (Rowland D. Prothero), English Farming Past and Present, 6th ed. (1961), is a classic work describing six centuries of British agriculture; Christopher Taylor, Village and Farmstead: A History of Rural Settlement in England (1983), analyzes the density of population in Britain in the late Iron Age; Freiherr Von Der Goltz, Geschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft, 2 vol. (1902–03), deals with agriculture in Germany. See also Albert Demolon, L’Évolution scientifique et l’agriculture française (1946); Michel Augé-Laribé, La Révolution agricole (1955); Z.W. Sneller (ed.), Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Landbouw, 1795–1940, 2nd ed. (1951); Heinz Haushofer, Die deutsche Landwirtschaft im technischen Zeitalter, 2nd ed. (1972); Cesare Longobardi, Land-Reclamation in Italy, trans. from the Italian (1936, reprinted 1975); Lewis Cecil Gray and Esther Katherine Thompson, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 2 vol. (1933, reprinted 1973); Percy W. Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860 (1925, reprinted 1973); Norman Scott Brien Gras, A History of Agriculture in Europe and America, 2nd ed. (1940, reprinted 1968); Reynold M. Wik, Steam Power on the American Farm (1953); Wayne D. Rasmussen (ed.), Readings in the History of American Agriculture (1960); Robert Leslie Jones, History of Agriculture in Ohio to 1880 (1983); Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (1981); Clark C. Spence, God Speed the Plow: The Coming of Steam Cultivation to Great Britain (1960); and Ronald H. Clark, The Development of the English Traction Engine (1960). For broader surveys see . Broader surveys include Jerome Blum (ed.), Our Forgotten Past: Seven Centuries of Life on the Land (1982), a well-illustrated collection of essays; and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Joseph Goy, Tithe and Agrarian History from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries, trans. from the French (1982), a comparative descriptionof description of agricultural production in several countries; and David Hoseason Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting, 1840–1900: A Study of the Rural Proletariat (1982), a blend of economic and social history.

The 20th century

Archie A. Stone and Harold E. Gulvin, Machines for Power Farming, 3rd ed. (1977), is a fine general text describing modern farm machinery, including power sources, tilling equipment, applicators for fertilizer, seeders, pest-control machinery, and harvesting equipment; Daniel Faucher, Le Paysan et la machine (1954), is a history of farm machinery; Hubert Martin, The Scientific Principles of Crop Protection, 7th ed. (1983), is a classic work by the world’s leading authority on pesticides; George Ordish, Untaken Harvest (1951), describes the economics of plant losses and their control; Kenneth Mellanby, Farming and Wildlife (1981), studies the effects of modern farming on native flora and fauna; and Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (1982), explores U.S. agricultural policies during the first half of the 20th century.

