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Research paper on history of agriculture
History of agriculture Essay
History of agriculture Essay
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Agriculture Agriculture is one of the largest industries in this day in time. Sometime around 12,000 years ago, our ancestors started their hand in farming. First, they grew wild vegetables of crops such as barley, peas, and lentils. They also raised herds of wild animals such as oxen, goats, and cattle. Many years later, they began to farm full time. They also began breeding both animals and plants. This created new varieties and breeds. Eventually this caused them to migrate outward and spread farming into parts of Europe and Asia. There was an idea that farming began with a single population that came from fundamental archaeologist discoveries in one part of the Mideast. The earliest farmers lived in the Fertile Crescent. This is a region …show more content…
If you ask your grandparents how they got their food, they may have many different answers than you think. Many will ask their selves why it is different. It is all because of the change in farming area and fertileness of the soil. There are over seven billion people in the world and that number is highly expected to expand to about nine billion by the year 2050. That is a large amount of people that need to be fed. I sometimes sit down and think, how will we supply enough food? I personally believe through changes and advances in the agricultural system, we will be able to produce enough food for the world. Over 200 years ago, 90 percent of the United States population lived on farms and produced their own food to eat. But today, only two percent of the population produces the food, including fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy. That is a very large change in the amount of people associated with producing food and making sure that everyone has enough to eat. Farmers use technology to make advantages in producing more food for a growing world. Through the use of the technology, each farmer could feed 155 people today, comparing to 1940 when one farmer could only feed 19 people.
Agriculture plays an enormous part in having a functioning society. The farming fields in the
Before the land of what we no class Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and other countries in the middle east grains, such as wheat and wild barley, could be seen growing in the wild without human hand to cultivate and nurture it (Authors 2007). Over time, humans began to recognize the benefit of the plants and began the first signs of human agriculture. The skill of farming took time and trial and error, but along the way, humans began to settle down to tend to their crops. Though the first crops were nothing more than seed s thrown about without rhyme or reason to the process we know today such as fields having, rows and sorting out the seeds to create a higher yield each harvest (Authors 2007). Because of the trial and error process, agriculture of plants did not take place of a short period but took many, many years to evolve to what we know today as agriculture; the new fa...
The blessing and curse of the Agricultural Revolution is advocated with its augmentation and dissemination. Taking the stipulative definition of “blessing” and “curse” from the original premise, one can only superimpose the layman’s terms of “negative” and “positive”. Upon examination of the two classifications within the Neolithic Period and ancient Mesopotamian civilization one can confirm the premise. Therefore, the agriculture revolution was a blessing and a curse for humanity. Human society began to emerge in the Neolithic Period or the New Stone Age. This new age began around 9,000 B.C.E. by the development of agriculture in the region surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and what is commonly referred to as “The Fertile Crescent” located in West Asia.1 The very development of agriculture had benefited humans by no longer having to move about in search of wild game and plants. Unencumbered by nomadic life humans found little need to limit family size and possessions and settled in a single location for many years. One negative aspect of this settling is that the population increased so much so that wild food sources were no longer sufficient to support large groups. Forced to survive by any means necessary they discovered using seeds of the most productive plants and clearing weeds enhanced their yield.2 This also lead humans to develop a wider array of tools far superior to the tools previously used in the Paleolithic Period or Old Stone Age. The spread of the Agricultural Revolution in the Neolithic Period also cultivated positive aspects by creating connections with other cultures and societies. Through these connections they exchanged knowledge, goods, and ideas on herding and farming.3 Another major positive aspec...
In order for us to maintain our lives, we need to consume food to supply nutrient-needs for our bodies. As the global population increased, the demand for food also increased. Increased population led to mass production of foods. However, even with this mass production, in under-developed countries, people are still undernourished. On other hand, in developed and developing countries, people are overfed and suffering from obesity. In addition, the current methods of industrial farming destroy the environment. These problems raised a question to our global food system. Will it be able to sustain our increasing global population and the earth? With this question in my mind, I decided to investigate the sustainability of our current global food system.
...inds to address the food for the future. Helping people help themselves is the only lasting help.
consumption and even further.” Our current global food system is not sustainable. It does not
According to Eric Holt Gimenez, the world already produces enough food to feed 10 billion people, yet over 22% of the Sub-Saharan population is undernourished. One of the main causes of this is due to food wastage. One-third of the food that is produced is never consumed (“What Causes Hunger?”). Not only is this food being wasted, it also releases over 3 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (“What Causes Hunger?”). The wastage of food directly doesn’t put food on the plates of those who need it and also further prevents it by destroying the environment without a proper reason. Another cause of hunger is who the food is feeding. About 60% of crops are farmed to feed humans, while 35% is for animal feed (“Introduction to Food Insecurity”). Although animals can be consumed, they take a lot more than they give. About 30 kilograms of grain can produce only 1 kilogram of edible beef (“Introduction to Food Security”). For those who are struggling with food is Sub-Saharan Africa, and diet that shifts away from meat consumption would assist in consuming more food. Another flaw in the where the food goes is the imports and exports of Sub-Saharan nations. Several countries have a few main crops that they produce a surplus of to export, and then they rely on imports for the rest of their food supply. The citizens buy imported food because it is less expensive, and the local farmers become poorer. Buying locally would put the money back into one’s own community instead of losing it all to a distant nation. A system that does not waste food and focuses on producing it for local humans would help reduce hunger in needy
But the limits of farming too were quickly discovered. If the earth were to produce food naturally, there would only be enough to feed about ten million individuals. With the earth's population now exceeding five billion we can see how this could pose a problem. Because of this overwhelming gap between how much the earth can produce and how much is actually needed, many agricultural advancements have been made that allow us to produce much more.
Scientists say that farmers need to produce 50-100 percent more food than they already do now.... ... middle of paper ... ... Chances are farmers aren’t going to pack up everything to adapt to a new farming method that is just too expensive for the farmers.
Farming has been an occupation since 8,500 B.C. On that year in the Fertile Crescent farming first began when people grew plants instead of picking them in the wild. Then nearly 5,000 years later oxen, horses, pigs, and dogs were domesticated. During the middle ages, the nobles divide their land into three fields. The reasoning for this was to plant two and leave one to recover. This was the start of crop rotation which is a big part of farming today. Burning down forest and then moving to another area is a farming technique used by the Mayans called Slash and burn. Mayan farmers also were able to drain swampy areas to farm them buy building canals. In 1701 Jethro Tull invented the seed drill and a horse drawn how that tilled the land. In Denmark they would plant turnips in the previously unplanted field. The turnips help restore the nutrients in the ground thus crop rotation is born. In England people began moving there fields closer to each other for a more efficient way of planting. Later in the 18th century selective breeding was introduce which made bigger, stronger, and more milk producing livestock. In the mid 1800’s a steam plough was invented. By the 1950 tractors, milking machines, and combines were used by almost farmers. The latest f...
Agriculture has been around for about 11,000 years. Around 9.500 BC, the first signs of crops began to show up around the coastlines of the Mediterranean. Emmer and einkorn wheat were the first crops that started to show up in this area, with barley, peas, lentils, chick peas, and flax following shortly. For the most part, everyone was a nomad and just travelled along with where a herd went. This went on until around 7.000 BC, and then the first signs of sowing and harvesting appeared in Mesopotamia. In the first ...
There are those that believe our planet has reached its maximum capacity to sustain humanity and we need to reduce our population to rectify it. It is also said that our planet is well capable of providing both the nutrition and caloric needs for humanity, both now and into the future as well. Regardless of where one’s opinion of the facts fall between these two arguments, global food security is not where it should be. Uneven development could be argued to be a cause of this. But it is not the only issue affecting the planet.
The first people that started to depend on farming for food were in Israel and Jordan in about 80000 B.C.. Farming became popular because people no longer had to rely on just searching for food to get their food. In about 3000 B.C. Countries such as Egypt and Mesopotamia started to develop large scale irrigation systems and oxen drawn plows. In about 500 B.C. the Romans started to realize that the soil needed certain nutrients in order to bare plants. They also realized that if they left the soil for a year with no plants, these important nutrients would replenish. So they started to leave half of a field fallow (unplanted). They then discovered that they could use legumes, or pulses to restore these vital nutrients, such as nitrogen, to the soil and this started the process known as rotating crops. They would plant half the field one year with a legume...
One of the most complex issues in the world today concerns human population. The number of people living off the earth’s resources and stressing its ecosystem has doubled in just forty years. In 1960 there were 3 billion of us; today there are 6 billion. We have no idea what maximum number of people the earth will support. Therefore, the very first question that comes into people’s mind is that are there enough food for all of us in the future? There is no answer for that. Food shortage has become a serious problem among many countries around the world. There are many different reasons why people are starving all over the world. The lack of economic justice and water shortages are just merely two examples out of them all.
The growing world population is demanding more and different kinds of food. Rapid economic growth in many developing countries has pushed up consumers' purchasing power, generated rising demand for food, and shifted food demand away from traditional staples and toward higher-value foods like meat and milk.