Agricultural Geography

Leslie Symons

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429727597
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a historical summary of agricultural development and representative ways in which agricultural production is undertaken in different social, economic and physical environments. It describes concepts and methodology for understanding any area or type of farming.

Part I
The Physical and Social Environment

CHAPTER 1
The Origins and Development of Agriculture

Every agricultural landscape is made up of individual farms, and it is the decisions of the owners, managers and workers of all those farms which result in the productive pattern that produces the cultivated landscape. The total farming landscape depends also for its appearance and functioning on the work of non-farming sections of the community in the transport network, power, drainage, woodlands, factories, shops and houses. All these elements have been constructed and modified by individuals and communities in response to the needs and pressures of their times, making use of the knowledge and artifacts that they have inherited from the past and those that they, their neighbours and others produce in thefr own lifetimes. The process of diffusion of knowledge and techniques is essential for progress or even to maintain stability in the face of invasions of pests and diseases and other threats to the existing way of life.

Any planner, administrator, or other reformer who enters the landscape with the intention or wish to influence its development, or merely to understand its functioning or interpret it for Others, ignores the past at the risk of failing in his task and, if it be a task with a practical result, of disrupting and disorganising the community in the area and leaving it in a worse state than before.

Just as the individual farm is the basic element of the agricultural landscape or region that should desirably be studied to understand the present economic functioning of the area, so it is the individual farm's history that should be analysed to arrive at the background of an existing pattern. In most cases, however, this is impracticable. Indeed, every farm is the successor of innumerable past farms, which have either disappeared completely or have left only slight traces of their former existence in field patterns, trees and hedgerows, ditches or buildings. Furthermore, even if numbers did not make it impossible to analyse every farm individually, concern for the privacy of the individual largely rules out such detailed investigation. So, with such sampling of individuals as may appear appropriate, the researcher turns to the more general background of crops, livestock, artifacts, labour, management and capital to explain the regional pattern and understand its needs.

How far back one should go into the past to explain the present is not capable of generalisation. For practical purposes today it is not so necessary to know that specialists trace the origins of wheat and barley to the Near East some 12,000 years ago, as to know the range of varieties now available from crop breeders and seed distributors. But for the intellectual satisfaction of historians, historical geographers and botanists, archaeologists and anyone involved in the history of agriculture there can be no limits to research. Somewhere along the line the purely academic merges with the practical and becomes relevant to present needs and the future. As to where this happens, again no generalisation can be offered, and every case must be judged on its merits. It can only be reiterated that it is folly to try to understand any region without considering its past, as may be seen on reflecting on many of the cases that are mentioned later in this book, such as the problems of productivity in Russia, of farm size in Ireland, of specialisation in New Zealand for a distant market, or of product selection in Malaysia. Every researcher should, therefore, have a broad knowledge of the history of agriculture and the diffusion and development of its. constituent parts and know where to pursue greater detail when and where needed. Here it is possible only to provide introductory notes on agricultural history as some background to the later chapters. More detailed surveys are readily available.¹ Before man's earliest attempts to control or influence vegetation, plants provided him with some food directly and some through the insects, animals and birds they supported. Use of fire-culture in some deliberate form, such as clearing forests and driving game, may take us back hundreds of thousands of years, but almost certainly tens of thousands.² The setting of fire to improve pasture is both old and widespread, and selection of plants, some to be encouraged, some to be destroyed by fire and other means, undoubtedly preceded the beginnings of agriculture proper.

The domestication of plants and animals probably began rather later than 10,000 B.C.¹ Early domestications included wheat and barley, sheep, goats and, later, cattle and pigs. Vegetative reproduction was probably understood earlier and utilised for food production in south-east Asia but archaeological evidence is much less readily available than for seed cultivation. Animal domestication may have originated with either sedentary cultivators or nomadic herders. Pastoralism may have developed from the modification of mixed farming as this was taken into the arid areas of central Asia, or mixed farming may have originated from the merging of seed cultivation and stock herding, as differing economies merged in the region of the Fertile Crescent.²

Agriculture is more likely to have developed with the economically more generalised gatherer-hunter-fisher populations occupying the more varied natural ecosystems, such as the forest and woodland margins, where a great variety of plants and animals were available, than with hunters occupying specialised ecosystems with limited species such as the natural grasslands.³

To Sauer,⁴ the most likely people to begin agricultural practices were 'some well-situated, progressive fishing folk living in a mild climate along fresh waters'. He proposed south-east Asia as the cradle of earliest agriculture. 'No other area is equally well situated or equally well furnished for the rise of a fishing-farming culture.' He argued that the earliest domesticated animals—dog, pig, fowl, duck and goose — originated there as animals of the household, in contrast to the herd animals of south-west Asia. Here also is the major centre of planting techniques and vegetative reproduction which, he accepted, man learnt before he learnt the growing of crops from seeds.

Diffusion of these cultures, in Sauer's view, occurred in the Pacific region, northwards to China, round the Indian Ocean to Africa and through the Mediterranean lands to Europe. Similar reliance on vegetative reproduction is found in tropical America. He favoured the north-western extremity of vegetative planting, that is, the Mexican-Central American border, as the hearth of the principal seed plants. In the Old World, Sauer recognised three centres of seed domestication — one in north China, a second in western India, extending to the eastern Mediterranean and a third in Ethiopa. 'In all three, vegetative reproduction was made difficult, annual seed growing facilitated by climate.'¹

Earlier, Vavilov² had listed eight independent centres of origin of the world's most important cultivated plants, based on expeditions he and other Russian scientists made throughout the world between 1916 and 1934. These included China, which he regarded as the earliest and largest centre, India with Burma and Assam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, which total area contributed some 300 species including rice and millet, soya beans, sugar cane, bananas, coconuts and other fruits and vegetables. Vavilov thought Central Asia, including north-west India, the home of some grains, legumes and cotton but rightly found south-west Asia more important for wheat and rye, alfalfa, temperate fruit and nuts. He also believed that some grains originated in Ethiopia. South Mexico and Central America were credited with the domestication of maize and the sweet potato and the Andean region with the potato. He noted the Mediterranean area as particularly important as a secondary source in which much selection took place as well as being the area in which the olive, vine and fig were domesticated.

More recent scientific work has modified these pioneering views. The general picture as summarised here is substantially unaltered but more importance is assigned to south-east Asia and Africa south of the Sahara and less to China, India and Central Asia. In each of the old world hearths of seed agriculture it would seem that cultivation included grasses for grain, legumes for protein and fat, and usually some additional oil and perhaps fibre plants. The distinctiveness of the agricultural complex that developed between the eastern Mediterranean and south-central Persia is the combination of seed growing with herding of animals — sheep, goats and cattle — in which we find the origins of modern mixed farming.

This early mixed farming of the Near East was evolving between 9000 and 5000 B.C. The first agriculture in Europe has been identified as existing before 5000 B.C. in Greece with widespread diffusion in the following millennium, to reach Holland before 4000 B.C. The sites of southern and central Europe reveal economies based on the cultivation on easily-worked loess soils, of wheats, barley, beans, peas, lentils and flax, and in some areas stock raising included oxen, sheep and pigs.¹ Cultivation was by primitive hoes, and was probably of a shifting kind, if only because of the lack of manure. In the later Neolithic economy of northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, however, cattle played an important part. Settlements became more permanent.² Clearance of the forests was beginning to outstrip their regenerative capacity, a condition that extended to the Rhineland and the Netherlands by the beginning of the Bronze Age. Throughout the Neolithic Age the diffusion of agriculture continued and settlements dated to as early as 2500 B.C. show that the grain and animal economy had extended to Ireland.

The Bronze Age, approximately 1500 to 500 B.C., saw the spread thoughout northern Europe of a light plough, the ard, which would not have been capable of breaking in new ground but would have permitted more efficient tillage of land already in cultivation. The succeeding Iron Age was the period in which the heavier soils came under cultivation with the development of the iron ploughshare.³ Iron tools did not begin to affect cultivation in Britain until about 300 B.C., but were part of the civilisation of southern Europe by 1000 B.C.

About 800 B.C. the Greek polis or city settlement was developing, based on the improved agriculture possible with the use of iron. Hills were terraced for the vine and olive, and these fruits together with grains and Greek breeds of the principal domestic animals were sent to the colonies, which extended from Egypt and the Crimea to the Iberian peninsula. In return Greece acquired other plants and animals, including the domestic fowl from the East. By the fourth century B.C. Greek agriculture and its administration were treated as a fine art. During the following centuries many agricultural treatises appeared and the science acquired its Roman name.

During the period of Greek and Roman colonisation and supremacy, agricultural products and ideas were exchanged throughout the great region of their influence, and beyond it through intermediate traders. New scientific devices, such as the Archimedes screw, made possible new approaches to irrigation and other aspects of land improvement and cultivation. All this development was stimulated by the growth of a monetary economy and the abandonment of subsistence agriculture in favour of production at least partly for a market. Estates organised by government agencies became dominant in large areas of the classical world. The latifundia, great estates based on slave labour, took the place of peasant settlements in much of the Roman world. As the supply of slaves diminished in the changed conditions of the pax Romana of later centuries, there was some reversion of organisation of these estates to a type of peasant tenantry, and subsistence farming became again more common.¹

The second century A.D., however, in spite of a decline in farming for the market, saw the spread of techniques, tools, plants and domestic animals beyond the Roman world as far as Ireland, Scandinavia and western Siberia. As in Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries, the feudal system bound the peasant or serf to the estate in much of Europe. In the Byzantine east, freeing of the peasantry began in the sixth century, but this movement was not paralleled in western Europe. The monasteries which developed in Egypt in the fourth century were, however, followed in the west during the succeeding centuries by the growth of the strong religious communities which kept alive scientific agriculture and land development.

THE MIDDLE AGES

In the millennium that preceded the agrarian revolution of the eighteenth century and the development of commercial farming as we know it today, developments in the techniques and administration of agriculture came at long intervals. The feudal system, in which the vassal owed allegiance to his lord in return for a measure of security, was expressed on the land by manorial organisation. The vassals supplied the lord with a portion of their produce and also had to work on the desmesne lands farmed for the lord's benefit. The system was partly a response to an economy in which money was scarce, as in western Europe, which was drained of gold and silver by the shift eastward of economic and military power, and largely cut off from the Mediterranean, Africa and the east by Arab conquests. The feudal a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps and diagrams
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: THE PHYSICAL & SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT
• PART II: SYSTEMS OF EXPLOITATION
• PART III: CONCEPTS & METHODOLOGY
• Metric equivalents
• Bibliography
• Index