Status Updates From The New Encyclopaedia Brita...

NEW STRAINS: GENETICS
The application of genetics to developing new strains of plants and animals has brought major changes in agriculture since the 1920s. Genetics as the science dealing with he principles of heredity and variation in plants and animals was established one at the beginning of the 20th century. Its application to practical problems came later.
Early work in genetics. The modern science of ...

New techniques. As the development of the sugar beet shows, new techniques may bring particular crops into new prominence. This discussion, however, is confined to three that, in some forms, are old yet today are transforming agriculture in many parts of the world.
Terracing. Terracing, which is basically grading steep land, such as hillsides, into a series of level benches, was known in antiquity and was ...

NEW CROPS AND TECHNIQUES
New crops and techniques are, in reality, modifications of the old. Soybeans, sugar beet, and grain sorghums, for example, all regarded as "new" crops, are new only in the sense that they are grown today in wider areas and have different uses from those of earlier times. Such techniques as terracing, dry farming, and irrigation are nearly as old as agriculture itself, but their widespread ...

Unit machinery . In recent yeas 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 machines, self propelled is the most important of these machines, see-propelled units are also in use for spraying, picking cotton, bailing units are also in use for...

Agricultural research and education. Scientists of the 18th century had established the principles that governed plant life. About 1837 the English agriculturalist 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 ...

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 ploy design, in a less esoteric way practical men had made significant improvements. Prominent among these was the English inventor Robert Ransom, ...

PROGRESS IN DIFFERENT COUNTRIES
Italy. Although Italy was the first modern country where a four-course rotation was advocated, traditional farming persisted there into the 18th century and even later. Italian farmers, however, had accepted maize, 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.

Livestock. 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. Unfortunately, there were disastrous outbreaks of cattle plague ...

Agricultural recession. What is now called a recession began toward the end of the 13th century. The disasters of the 14th, climactic, medical, and military, followed. Famine resulted from excessively bad weather in 1314, 1315, and 1316; a small recovery followed in 1317. Yields, never high (from six to ten bushels of wheat per acre, or about 120 to 200 litres per hectare; a little more for barley, rye and oats...

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 (Figure 5). The earliest example of this system date from about 800, the Charlemagne was crowed emperor of the West. Usually these strips of land, normally about an acre (0.4 hectare) ...

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 ws sometimes fitted with two small "ears" that helped to make a more distinct rut. Though it could not turn a furrow, ti could invert some of the soil if held sideways. It was usually...

The Mughal century (c. 1600). At the climax of the Mughal Empire, with the arrival and presence of the Western powers, a commercial economy based on oceanic trade was evolving. But no technological revolution in cultivating tools or techniques had occurred since roughly by the time of the Upanișads (c. 600-300 BC).
The crops were broadly divided into rice zones and wheat and millet zones. Rice predominated in ...

THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT

India's most important contribution to world agriculture is rice (Orysa sativa), the staple food and crop of most of south, Southeast, and east Asia. Sugarcane, varieties of legumes, and tropical fruit like the mango also are native to the subcontinent.
Archaeological records of this region's prehistory are still incomplete and uneven. Evidence of how the transition from pastoralism to ...

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 ...

Meso-America and Peru. As far as is known, no animals were domesticated in the Americas until a late date. Available evidence seems to indicate that, in spite of the early domestication of some plants, village life did not begin to develop on any scale until 3500 BC or possibly somewhat earlier in Mexico, following domestication of maize. The process of agricultural development was therefore rather slow, ...

II. Early agricultural societies
In the Old World, settled life had developed on higher ground from Iran to Anatolia (site of modern Turkey) and the Levant, and in China in the semi-arid Ioess plains, but the earliest civilizations based on complex and productive agriculture developed on the alluvia of the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Nile. When the first villages appeared there is not certain. It is known, ...

EARLY DEVELOPMENT
The development of agriculture was an intensification by man of his food extractive processes. More food could be obtained form a given area of land by encouraging plant and animal species found useful, and discouraging other.s This provided for an increased population and gave better opportunity for settled life. Durable houses, as well as tools such as pestles, mortars, and grindstones, all...

Agriculture, History of
In spite of industrialization in many parts of the world, agriculture still drafts into its service more of the world's aggregate manpower than all other occupations combined. For information on agriculture in specific countries or regions, see articles such as CHINA; AFRICA; or WISCONSIN. For general information on agriculture in underdeveloped countries, see AGRICULTURE ECONOMICS; ECONOMIC..

Agricultural engineering. Although agricultural engineering did not become a separate discipline until the 20th century, engineering in the 19th century not only constructed useful works for irrigation and other purposes but made significant theoretical contributions. Agricultural engineering tended to focus on farm machinery, originally improvised by farmers, but that the 1930s manufactured industrially on a ...

Major divisions of agricultural science. The agricultural sciences are normally subdivided into five groups:
1. Soil science, which deals with the geological generation of soil, with soil physics, and soil chemistry, as they pertain to agriculture, and with all other factors relevant to soil fertility.
2. Plant production, which comprises applied plant physiology, plant nutrition, plant breeding ...

Agricultural Sciences

The agricultural sciences, dealing with the aims and problems of farm production, include soil cultivation, crop growing and harvesting, animal husbandry, and, to some extent, the processing of plant and animal products to a marketable stage.
Wherever scientific methods have been applied, they have revolutionized agriculture. In prescientific agriculture, six people could produce barely ...

Strengths and weaknesses. If they were free to choose, most farm families would want to own the land they farm Wherever collectivization of private famers has been carried out, it has required the use of force or the threat of force. But if family farming is to be viable it must function efficiently, which means that farmers must have access to adequate sources of credit; must be able to obtain fertilizers, ...

THE ORGANIZATION OF FARMING
Except in nations with Communist governments, most farm land is privately owned. This does not mean, however, that land is owned by those who farm it. In most countries a major aspiration of farm people has been to achieve the ownership of the land they work. After World War II, Japan and Taiwan underwent land reforms that were intended to broaden ownership ; these are generally ...

LAND, OUTPUT AND YIELDS
Only a small fraction of the world's land area—about 11 percent—may be considered arable, if arable land is defined as land planted to crops, including temporary fallow and temporary meadows, and under-tree crops. Less that a fifth of the world's land area is in permanent meadows and pastures The remainder is either in forests or is not being used for productive purposes.

The problem of standards. None of the governments engaged in regulating farm prices and incomes has been able to apply a meaningful standard as to what a fair price or reasonable income is. The actual measures adopted, such as specific price supports or intervention prices, have been determined through the political process with little reference to formal principles or standards.
In the United States the ...

EFFORTS TO CONTROL PRICES AND PRODUCTION
Governments in recent decades have undertaken to control both prices and output in the agricultural sector, largely in response to the pressures of the farmers themselves. In the absence of such control, farm prices tend to fluctuate more than do most other prices; and the incomes of farmers fluctuate to an even greater degree. Not only are incomes in agriculture unstable ...

Peasant agriculture. One characteristic of undeveloped peasant agriculture is its self-sufficiency. Farm families in those circumstances consume a substantial part of what they produce. While some of their output may be sole in the market, their total product is generational not much larger than what is needed for the maintenance of the family. The typical farm worker will produce enough for himself and about ...

Agricultural Economics

Agriculture is the source of livelihood for more than half of the world's population. In some countries more than 70 percent of the inhabitants support themselves by farming, while in the more industrialized countries the proportion ranges much lower—to less than 7 percent in the United States and less than 4 percent in Great Britain, In general one can say that when a large fraction of a ...

Agricola, Georgius
A 16th-century German scholar and writer on mining and metallurgical practice who based his work to a degree unprecedented in his time on observation and inquiry in the field, Agricola has been called the father of mineralogy. while a highly educated classicist and humanist, well regarded by scholars of his own and later times, he was yet singularly independent of the theories of ancient ...

Rejections of the agnostic principle. Anyone who insists on the foregoing touchstones may still be agnostic as well as religious. What cannot consist with agnosticism is a calculated commitment to faith seen as altogether without evidential warrant. The classic example of such commitment was provided in the 17th century by the Wager Argument of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, who assumed, for the sake ...