agriculture, science and practice of producing crops and livestock from the natural resources of the earth. The primary aim of agriculture is to cause the land to produce more abundantly and at the same time to protect it from deterioration and misuse. The diverse branches of modern agriculture include agronomy agronomy (əgrŏn`əmē)
..... Click the link for more information. , horticulture horticulture [Lat. hortus=garden], science and art of gardening and of cultivating fruits, vegetables, flowers, and ornamental plants. Horticulture generally refers to small-scale gardening, and agriculture to the growing of field crops, usually on a large
..... Click the link for more information. , economic entomology entomology, study of insects , an arthropod class that comprises about 900,000 known species, representing about three fourths of all the classified animal species.
..... Click the link for more information. , animal husbandry animal husbandry, aspect of agriculture concerned with the care and breeding of domestic animals such as cattle, goats, sheep, hogs, and horses. Domestication of wild animal species was a crucial achievement in the prehistoric transition of human civilization from
..... Click the link for more information. , dairying dairying, business of producing, processing, and distributing milk and milk products. Ninety percent of the world's milk is obtained from cows; the remainder comes from goats, buffaloes, sheep, reindeer, yaks, and other ruminants.
..... Click the link for more information. , agricultural engineering, soil chemistry, and agricultural economics.

Early Agriculture

Early people depended for their survival on hunting, fishing, and food gathering. To this day, some groups still pursue this simple way of life, and others have continued as roving herders (see nomad nomad (nō`măd'), one of a group of people without fixed habitation, especially pastoralists.
..... Click the link for more information. ). However, as various groups of people undertook deliberate cultivation of wild plants and domestication of wild animals, agriculture came into being. Cultivation of crops—notably grains such as wheat, rice, corn, rye, barley, and millet—encouraged settlement of stable farm communities, some of which grew to be towns and city-states in various parts of the world. Early agricultural implements—the digging stick, the hoe hoe, usually a flat blade, variously shaped, set in a long wooden handle and used primarily for weeding and for loosening the soil. It was the first distinctly agricultural implement. The earliest hoes were forked sticks.
..... Click the link for more information. , the scythe, and the plow plow or plough, agricultural implement used to cut furrows in and turn up the soil, preparing it for planting. The plow is generally considered the most important tillage tool.
..... Click the link for more information. —developed slowly over the centuries, each innovation (e.g., the introduction of iron) causing profound changes in human life. From early times, too, people created ingenious systems of irrigation to control water supply, especially in semiarid areas and regions of periodic rainfall, e.g., the Middle East, the American Southwest and Mexico, the Nile Valley, and S Asia.

Farming was often intimately associated with landholding (see tenure 2)). Spiritual welfare was provided for by frankalmoign tenure, i.e., granting lands in charity to religious bodies. Serjeanty tenure furnished the king with needed officials and with personal services.
..... Click the link for more information. ) and therefore with political organization. Growth of large estates involved the use of slaves (see slavery slavery, institution based on a relationship of dominance and submission, whereby one person owns another and can exact from that person labor or other services.
..... Click the link for more information. ) and bound or semifree labor. In the Western Middle Ages the manorial system manorial system (mənôr`ēəl, măn–) or seignorial system
..... Click the link for more information. was the typical organization of more or less isolated units and determined the nature of the agricultural village. In Asia large holdings by the nobles, partly arising from feudalism (especially in China and Japan), produced a similar pattern.

The Rise of Commercial Agriculture

As the Middle Ages waned, increasing communications, the commercial revolution, and the rise of cities in Western Europe tended to turn agriculture away from subsistence farming toward the growing of crops for sale outside the community (commercial agriculture). In Britain the practice of inclosure inclosure or enclosure, in British history, the process of inclosing (with fences, ditches, hedges, or other barriers) land formerly subject to common rights.
..... Click the link for more information. allowed landlords to set aside plots of land, formerly subject to common rights, for intensive cropping or fenced pasturage, leading to efficient production of single crops.

In the 16th and 17th cent. horticulture was greatly developed and contributed to the so-called agricultural revolution. Exploration and intercontinental trade, as well as scientific investigation, led to the development of horticultural knowledge of various crops and the exchange of farming methods and products, such as the potato, which was introduced from America along with beans and corn (maize) and became almost as common in N Europe as rice is in SE Asia.

The appearance of mechanical devices such as the sugar mill and Eli Whitney's cotton gin helped to support the system of large plantations based on a single crop. The Industrial Revolution after the late 18th cent. swelled the population of towns and cities and increasingly forced agriculture into greater integration with general economic and financial patterns. In the American colonies the independent, more or less self-sufficient family farm became the norm in the North, while the plantation, using slave labor, was dominant (although not universal) in the South. The free farm pushed westward with the frontier.

Modern Agriculture

In the N and W United States the era of mechanized agriculture began with the invention of such farm machines as the reaper reaper, early farm machine drawn by draft animals or tractor and used to harvest grain. Its historical predecessors were the sickle and the cradle scythe, which are still used in some parts of the world.
..... Click the link for more information. , the cultivator cultivator, agricultural implement for stirring and pulverizing the soil, either before planting or to remove weeds and to aerate and loosen the soil after the crop has begun to grow. The cultivator usually stirs the soil to a greater depth than does the harrow .
..... Click the link for more information. , the thresher, and the combine combine (kŏm`bīn), agricultural machine that performs both harvesting and threshing operations.
..... Click the link for more information. . Other revolutionary innovations, e.g., the tractor tractor, in agriculture, vehicle used to pull such equipment as plows, cultivators, and mowers; to power stationary devices such as saws and winches; and to push snowplows and earth-moving implements.
..... Click the link for more information. , continued to appear over the years, leading to a new type of large-scale agriculture. Modern science has also revolutionized food processing; refrigeration, for example, has made possible the large meatpacking plants and shipment and packaging of perishable foods. Urbanization has fostered the specialties of market gardening market gardening, cultivation, on suburban land of high value, of vegetables and flowers for the supply of nearby cities. Heavy fertilizing and the planting of successive crops are employed to obtain continuous returns from the acreage.
..... Click the link for more information. and truck farming truck farming, horticultural practice of growing one or more vegetable crops on a large scale for shipment to distant markets. It is usually less intensive and diversified than market gardening .
..... Click the link for more information. . Harvesting operations (see harvester harvester, farm machine that mechanically harvests a crop. Small-grain harvesting has been mechanized to a certain extent since early times. In the modern period the first harvester to gain general acceptance was made by Cyrus McCormick in 1831 (see reaper ).
..... Click the link for more information. ) have been mechanized for almost every plant product grown. Breeding programs have developed highly specialized animal, plant, and poultry poultry, domesticated fowl kept primarily for meat and eggs; including birds of the order Galliformes, e.g., the chicken, turkey , guinea fowl , pheasant , quail , and peacock ; and natatorial (swimming) birds, e.g., the duck and goose .
..... Click the link for more information. varieties, thus increasing production efficiency. The development of genetic engineering genetic engineering, the use of various methods to manipulate the DNA (genetic material) of cells to change hereditary traits or produce biological products.
..... Click the link for more information. has given rise to genetically modified transgenic crops and, to a lesser degree, livestock that possess a gene from an unrelated species that confers a desired quality. Such modification allows livestock to be used as "factories" for the production of growth hormone and other substances (see pharming pharming (fär`mĭng), the use of genetically altered livestock, such as cows, goats, pigs, and chickens, to produce medically useful
..... Click the link for more information. ). In the United States and other leading food-producing nations agricultural colleges and government agencies attempt to increase output by disseminating knowledge of improved agricultural practices, by the release of new plant and animal types, and by continuous intensive research into basic and applied scientific principles relating to agricultural production and economics.

These changes have, of course, given new aspects to agricultural policies. In the United States and other developed nations, the family farm is disappearing, as industrialized farms, which are organized according to industrial management techniques, can more efficiently and economically adapt to new and ever-improving technology, specialization of crops, and the volatility of farm prices in a global economy. Niche farming, in which specialized crops are raised for a specialized market, e.g., heirloom tomatoes or exotic herbs sold to gourmet food shops and restaurants, revived or encouraged some smaller farms in the latter 20th and early 21st cents., but did little to stop the overall decrease in family farms. In Third World countries, where small farms, using rudimentary techniques, still predominate, the international market has had less effect on the internal economy and the supply of food.

Most of the governments of the world face their own type of farm problem, and the attempted solutions vary as much as does agriculture itself. The modern world includes areas where specialization and conservation have been highly refined, such as Denmark, as well as areas such as N Brazil and parts of Africa, where forest peoples still employ "slash-and-burn" agriculture—cutting down and burning trees, exhausting the ash-enriched soil, and then moving to a new area. In other regions, notably SE Asia, dense population and very small holdings necessitate intensive cultivation, using people and animals but few machines; here the yield is low in relation to energy expenditure. In many countries extensive government programs control the planning, financing, and regulation of agriculture. Agriculture is still the occupation of almost 50% of the world's population, but the numbers vary from less than 3% in industrialized countries to over 60% in Third World countries.

See also agricultural subsidies agricultural subsidies, financial assistance to farmers through government-sponsored price-support programs. Beginning in the 1930s most industrialized countries developed agricultural price-support policies to reduce the volatility of prices for farm products and to
..... Click the link for more information. ; dry farming dry farming, farming system adopted in areas having an annual rainfall of approximately 15 to 20 in. (38.1–50.8 cm)—with much of the rainfall in the spring and early summer—where irrigation is impractical.
..... Click the link for more information. ; Granger movement Granger movement, American agrarian movement taking its name from the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, an organization founded in 1867 by Oliver H. Kelley and six associates. Its local units were called granges and its members grangers.
..... Click the link for more information. ; Green Revolution Green Revolution, term referring mainly to dramatic increases in cereal-grain yields in many developing countries beginning in the late 1960s, due largely to use of genetically improved varieties.
..... Click the link for more information. ; ranch ranch, large farm devoted chiefly to raising and breeding cattle, horses, sheep, and goats. The cattle ranch was introduced from Latin America to Texas and the plains of the W United States and Canada.
..... Click the link for more information. ; range range, large area of land unsuited to cultivation but supporting native grasses and other plants suitable for livestock grazing. Principal areas in the western hemisphere are the pampas of South America and the prairies of the United States and Canada.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Bibliography

See R. Jager, The Fate of Family Farming (2004).

agriculture

Science or art of cultivating the soil, growing and harvesting crops, and raising livestock. Agriculture probably first developed in South Asia and Egypt, then spread to Europe, Africa, the rest of Asia, the islands of the central and South Pacific, and finally to North and South America. Agriculture in the Middle East is believed to date from 9000–7000 BC. Early cultivated crops include wild barley (Middle East), domesticated beans and water chestnuts (Thailand), and pumpkins (the Americas). Domestication of animals occurred during roughly the same period. Slash-and-burn land–clearing methods and crop rotation were early agricultural techniques. Steady improvements in tools and methods over the centuries increased agricultural output, as did mechanization, selective breeding and hybridization, and, in the 20th century, the use of herbicides and insecticides. More of the world's aggregate manpower is devoted to agriculture than to all other occupations combined.