Judi’s Reviews > The New Encyclopaedia Britannica Set, Volumes 1-30 > Status Update

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) ...