History of Agriculture

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Early history of agriculture

Expansion of agriculture

Emergence

The beginnings of agriculture emerged as a reaction of largely sedentary hunter cultures to seasonal food shortages, which were caused by overhunting of wild stocks and the cooling of the climate in the recent Dryas period . People inevitably chose (without the appropriate knowledge and technology) the more labor-intensive and insecure forms of the new productive farming and livestock farming , since a return to the nomadic way of life was no longer possible and / or no longer wanted. This went hand in hand with the increasing transformation of the natural environment, with the result that an ever larger proportion of plants became usable for humans. This in turn improved the quantitative supply situation, so that more people could be fed per unit area. A mutually reinforcing development of the steadily increasing population density and more and more intensive forms of agriculture as well as an almost global expansion of agriculture began.

Leonid Grinin assumes that agriculture developed in regions where there were suitable environmental conditions - for example in Southeast Asia. The first cultivation of grain also took place in the Middle East, i.e. in ancient Egypt or in Palestine . Grinin sets the first beginning of agriculture in the period from 12,000 to 9,000 BC. BC, although some of the archaeological finds are somewhat older. Manioc and pumpkins were grown in the Moxos plain over 10,000 years ago .

In ancient times, wheat, vines and olive trees were grown in the Mediterranean region , combined with livestock farming in the heavily deforested mountains. In addition, there was fruit and vegetable growing , which, like viticulture, was transferred to Central Europe by the Romans. The Arabs introduced cotton and sugar cane cultivation and irrigation techniques to Spain.

Simple tools such as a hoe , sickle or scythe were developed after the beginning of the cultivation of the fields. The use of grave sticks to dig up roots, tubers etc. is documented in prehistoric times. The first Ritz plows probably date from the 5th millennium BC. BC, but until the end of the 18th century agriculture was largely shaped by the physical labor of humans or animals.

Europe

The culture of linear ceramics brought about 5700 BC. BC agriculture from the Balkans along the Danube to Central Europe. The band ceramists cultivated emmer (Triticum dicoccum), einkorn (Triticum monococcum), spelled (Triticum aestivum subsp. Spelta), flax (Linum usitatissimum) and the legumes lentil and pea, presumably in the wasteland . Geoclimatic and geoecological research indicate a very mild climate during the spread of the ceramic band culture in Central Europe. From the point of view of climate development, the Atlantic was the warmest epoch of the last 75,000 years that Europe experienced with regional temporal differences and brief interruptions. Both summer and winter temperatures were 1–2 ° C higher than in the 20th century. The winters in particular were very mild.

In the center of the picture is a harvest knife from 5000 BC. BC, including reconstructions; the blades were made of worked flint . Various adze blades on the left edge of the picture . Historical Museum of the Palatinate, Speyer

But even before that, the cardial or imprint culture in the 7th millennium BC BC agriculture along the Italian Mediterranean coast to southern France and from there to the rest of France and Spain . A culture named after the French town of La Hoguette reached the Meuse and Rhine even before the band pottery . At first, arable farming was mainly carried out on river terraces and areas with loess soils . At first, the forest pasture ( Hute ) and the leaf hay extraction ( Schneitelwirtschaft ) were operated in a close functional, seasonal context to the keeping of livestock. The further land grab happened then by forest clearing .

Painting from 1500

From the 6th millennium BC The expansion of plowing followed and later that of change of use economy. To increase the soil fertility , manure was used , with pieces of lawn being mixed with the animal manure .

From finds in ancient ceramics (o grave goods etc...) One knows some of the Celts cultivated plants: spelled , emmer , einkorn , poppy , goats wheat , barley , millet , field beans , lentils , flax oil and fiber production.

In Northern and Eastern Europe, in addition to clearing forests, draining swamps and moors by means of drainage ditches was an important method for gaining arable land.

Modern history of agriculture

Agricultural work in a depiction around 1470
Farmers harvesting barley in 1943
Oat harvest in 1974

Since the 8th century, the three-field economy with winter and summer cereals as well as fallow land (one year calm of the soil) prevailed in Europe , but regionally there were also numerous other forms of crop rotation . The summer hay harvest became an important part of the rural working world. The word Grummet for 'second mowing' can be traced back to the 13th century.

The recent history of agriculture has been shaped by rising grain prices, intermittent hunger crises and an increase in the population since the Thirty Years' War .

Since the 16th century there has been an increasing intensification of agriculture, the traditional three-field economy was further developed into a continuous crop rotation in the 18th century. This period also saw the improvement of existing and the introduction of new agricultural techniques falls (eg. As ground-way plow and shoeing of horses increasingly earlier than draft animals used oxen replaced). The targeted selection of seeds and breeding animals enabled the yields to be increased. In addition, there was the cultivation of previous wasteland and the spread of new crops such as the potato in Europe - partly through government measures.

The term agricultural revolution is used for the period from around 1700 onwards. Around 1800 around 75% of all workers in Bavaria were still employed in agriculture.

The 19th and 20th centuries were shaped by the further mechanization and specialization of agriculture. In 1840, Justus von Liebig described the possibility of using mineral fertilizers in his work "Organic chemistry in its application to agriculture and physiology" , or "Agricultural chemistry" for short . Synthetic fertilizers could be produced from the end of the 19th century. Like successes in plant and animal breeding and the development of new machines, it made it possible to increase yields many times over. However, the productivity gap between areas with modern and traditional agriculture widened with farm deaths as a lasting consequence. Because of the shortage of human labor with large areas to be cultivated , the mechanization of agriculture began . This development was a long process. The migration of many workers from the countryside to the industrial cities initially affected the industrialized countries and, since the 1960s, as part of the Green Revolution, also the developing countries.

The European colonization was also the beginning of a global expansion of the agricultural economy and the world trade in agricultural products. This included the transfer of forms of production to other continents, the emergence of a new export and capital-oriented form of business ( plantation economy ) - often at the expense of the population's self-sufficiency - and the spread of cultivated plants and livestock far beyond their original areas of origin ( Columbian Exchange ).

Despite various land reforms , the agricultural area of ​​the individual farms increased again and again. In Germany, a quarter of the arable land was cultivated by just 0.2 percent of all farms in the early 1930s. On the other hand, the government tried to secure the economic future of the companies by setting a minimum size. The Reichserbhofgesetz (Reichserbhofgesetz) in Germany in 1933 stipulated the following: "Field food is that amount of land that is necessary to feed and clothe a family regardless of the market and the general economic situation and to maintain the economic flow of the farm." Individual farms decreased in the long term. In agriculture in the GDR, the areas for the LPGs developed as follows:

  • In 1960 it was 280 hectares per farm
  • In 1970 there were 599 ha per farm
  • In 1980 there were 1,276 hectares per farm
  • In 1989 there were 1,391 hectares per farm

Socio-ecological consideration

The condensation of agricultural history through the science of social ecology mainly results in changes in the dimensions of energy, time and area.

energy

When it comes to the flow of energy in agricultural systems, a distinction is first made between energy use and energy yield. The amount of energy used for the purpose of plant and animal production is subsumed under energy use, i.e. H. For example, the use of human (and possibly animal) muscle power from metabolized food (internal use of energy) or the direct use of fossil fuels for agricultural machinery and the indirect use of energy, which is caused by the manufacture of machines and other means of production (tools, animal feed, fertilizers, Pesticides etc.) was caused (external use of energy) . For traditional agricultural systems , biomass from food is particularly relevant, which in turn flows back into production in a circular system . For industrialized agricultural systems , all other energy sources (oil, gas, nuclear fuel, water, wind, sun, etc.) play by far the greatest role. The energy yield describes the amount of used energy that is obtained from the corresponding area. It corresponds to the biomass extraction used for direct nutrition, for the manufacture of products or for heat generation.

The use of energy has increased dramatically with the development of new forms of agriculture. Conventional hunters, pasture keepers and hoe farmers only use muscle power, so that the use of energy is extremely low at around 0.5 to under 400 megajoules per hectare and year (MJ / ha / a). But even here there are clear differences: nomadic shepherds already use 35 times as much energy as hunters, moving field farmers 330 times as much and moving pasture herders 855 times as much. The energy yield of both types of animal husbandry, at around 390 to just over 1,000 MJ / ha / a, is significantly higher than for hunters and gatherers (2.9 MJ / ha / a), but the energy efficiency is only a fifth to just under half as high. Hacking, on the other hand, is about twice to a good nine times more efficient than hunting and gathering and enables yields of 15,000 to 25,000 MJ / ha / a.

In traditional agriculture (which some authors no longer count among the traditional forms of farming), human muscle power is no longer the only use of the plow with the help of draft animals and, more recently, the use of fertilizers and equipment from industrial production. As a result, the energy consumption is already 18 times higher than in field cultivation . The energy yield, on the other hand, is only 1.7 times as high on average. In the worst case it is less than half as high as in field cultivation, but in the best case it is over 2.5 times as high. This mostly unfavorable ratio is reflected in the energy efficiency: In most cases, primitive farming is significantly more efficient than traditional farming (on average more than twice as high, in the extremes between 0.4 and 16 times higher).

time

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The time factor is determined by how many people in a society are employed for food production and for how long (see working hours ). Here, too, a distinction is made between the internal time input of the agricultural workers and the external input, which is used to manufacture the means of production. In pre-industrial times, when the majority of the population worked in agriculture, working hours were based on natural limits such as the length of the day; people worked longer in summer than in winter .

surface

The transformation of natural areas ( biotopes ) is also referred to as the "colonization of nature". While wild hunters use the existing biotopes almost exclusively in their natural composition, soil farmers are making massive changes to the cultivated areas: The natural vegetation is replaced by plants that have been modified by breeding, the energy, water and chemical balance is consciously influenced, areas are being replaced by traffic routes and Buildings sealed etc. These interventions are very complex, so that their intensity is often reduced to the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP, social appropriation of net primary production), which relates the amount of anthropogenically produced biomass on a certain area to the extraction . One can also say that the HANPP specifically refers to the intervention in the flow of energy: the higher the value, the less energy generated is available for non-human organisms. This value as a suitable indicator of the overall consequences of colonization . Furthermore, the intensity of agriculture and the technology used is ultimately reflected in the population density , in the number of people who can be fed from a certain area unit, and the specific area productivity .

See also

literature

  • Wilhelm Abel : Agricultural crises and the agricultural economy in Central Europe from the 13th to the 19th century. 3. Edition. Hamburg / Berlin 1978.
  • same: history of German agriculture from the early Middle Ages to the 19th century. Stuttgart 1962.
  • Walter Achilles: Agriculture in the early modern period (= Encyclopedia of German History. No. 10). Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-486-55702-5 .
  • Isabel Alfonso (Ed.): The Rural History of Medieval European Societies. Trends and Perspectives. Brepols, 2007.
  • Edith Ennen, Walter Janssen: German agricultural history. From the Neolithic to the threshold of the industrial age . Wiesbaden 1979.
  • Günther Franz (ed.): German agricultural history . 6 volumes. Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 1993ff.
  • Ulrich Kluge: Agriculture and rural society in the 20th century (= Encyclopedia of German History. No. 73). Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-56605-9 . ( Summary and review ).
  • Christian Lauk: Social-ecological characteristics of agricultural systems. A global overview and comparison. In: Social Ecology Working Paper 78. Institute of Social Ecology, Vienna 2005, ISSN  1726-3816 .
  • Marcel Mazoyer, Laurence Roudart: Histoire des agricultures du monde: You neolithique à la crise contemporaine. Seuil, Paris 2002, ISBN 2-02-053061-9 . (Engl. A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis. Monthly Review Press, New York 2006, ISBN 1-58367-121-8 )
  • Thomas Miedaner: From hoes to genetic engineering - the cultural history of plant production in Central Europe. DLG Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-7690-0645-3 .
  • Eberhard Schulze : German agricultural history: 7500 years of agriculture in Germany. 3rd, revised, improved and supplemented edition. Shaker-Verlag, Aachen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8440-2636-8 .
  • Alois Seidl: German agricultural history . DLG-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-7690-0655-0 .
  • Tom Standage: An Edible History of Humanity. Walker & Company, New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-8027-1588-3 .
  • Ulrich Willerding : Agricultural Production Structures in the Middle Ages. In: Bernd Herrmann (Ed.): Man and the environment in the Middle Ages. Stuttgart 1986; 3rd anastatic edition ibid, pp. 244-256.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hermann Parzinger : The children of Prometheus. A history of mankind before the invention of writing. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-406-66657-5 , pp. 113–122: "1 Specialized Levant hunters after the end of the Ice Age", "2 First steps to rural life in the Fertile Crescent", " The older pre-ceramic period A (PPN A) ”.
  2. ↑ Marion Benz: The Neolithization in the Middle East . Ex oriente, second, hardly changed edition, Berlin 2008. ISBN 3-9804241-6-2 . pdf version , pp. 18, 32–43, 90.
  3. ↑ a b Lauk 2005, p. 4.
  4. ↑ Grinin LE: Production Revolutions and Periodization of History: A Comparative and Theoretic-mathematical Approach , Social Evolution & History. Volume 6, Number 2, September 2007
  5. ↑ Umberto Lombardo, José Iriarte, Lautaro Hilbert, Javier Ruiz-Pérez, José M. Capriles, Heinz Veit: Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia. In: Nature. 2020, doi : 10.1038 / s41586-020-2162-7 .
  6. ↑ Agriculture began in the Amazon 10,000 years ago. University of Bern , April 8, 2020, accessed on April 8, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Jürgen Franssen: From hunter to farmer Economic forms in Neolithic Anatolia.
  8. ↑ Thomas Miedaner: Cultivated Plants. Springer-Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 2014, ISBN 978-3-642-55293-9 , p. 20 f.
  9. ↑ Band ceramic land acquisition and loess areas. Steppe Theory - Lexicon of Geography. Drawing from "Spectrum" Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg 2001
  10. ^ P. Hanelt: The actual flora of cultivated plants: The result of autochthonous developments and introductions Monograph. Jar. Bot. Cordoba, 5: 59-69 (1997)
  11. ↑ Andrew S. Goudie: Environmental change. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1977
  12. ↑ Hermann Flohn: The problem of climate changes in the past and future. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1997, ISBN 3-534-80017-6
  13. ↑ Martin Bell, Michael JC Walker: Late Quaternary environmental change: physical and human perspectives. Harlow, Essex 1992, ISBN 0-470-21847-9
  14. ↑ a b Hans Friebertsäuser: Land and Stadt im Wandel - Dialect and rural working world in the district of Biedenkopf-Marburg , Marburg 1991
  15. ↑ GRUMMET, n., Foenum secundum . In: Grimm: German dictionary. Hirzel, Leipzig 1854–1961 ( woerterbuchnetz.de , University of Trier).
  16. ↑ Werner König: dtv-Atlas German language (=  dtv-Atlas . Volume 3025 ). 1st edition. dtv, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-423-03025-9 , Grummet , p. 215 , col. 1 (map p. 214).
  17. ↑ Ulrich Christian Pallach (Editor): Hunger - sources to a daily problem in Europe and the Third World, the 17th to 20th centuries , dtv documents, Munich 1986, pages 11-26
  18. ↑ News from the Potato King. Exhibition about Friedrich II and the tuber . taz.de, July 19, 2012.
  19. ↑ Palatinate farmers brought the potatoes to Prussia ( Memento from October 1, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), website of the Palatinate early, table and refined potato producers' association w. V.
  20. ↑ Martin Weißenborn: The Liberalism of Mill and Bentham - Differences and Parallels. Academic publication series, GRIN Verlag 2007, ISBN 3638667960 , ISBN 9783638667968 , p. 3.
  21. ↑ Reiner Prass: Reform program and peasant interests. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1997 (Volume 132 of publications by the Max Planck Institute for History, Max Planck Institute for History Göttingen), ISBN 3525354479 , ISBN 9783525354476 , p. 15.
  22. ^ Helmut Rankl: Country folk and early modern state in Bavaria 1400-1800 . Commission for Bavarian State History, 1999, ISBN 3-7696-9692-1 , p. 8 .
  23. ↑ Adam Tooze : Economy of Destruction . Siedler, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-88680-857-1 . , P. 212 f.
  24. ↑ see Section 2, Paragraph 2 in the Reichserbhofgesetz of September 29, 1933.
  25. ↑ "That was a great injustice." Forced collectivization 50 years ago. In: Thüringische Landeszeitung. April 26, 2010.
  26. ^ Hans Mittelbach: Structural change in agriculture , Forum German Unity, No. 11, Bonn-Bad Godesberg 1992, page 29
  27. ↑ Lauk 2005, pp. 4, 17.
  28. ↑ Lauk 2005, pp. 23-24.
  29. ↑ Lauk 2005, pp. 37-38, 40-45, 46-53.
  30. ^ Dieter Haller : Dtv-Atlas Ethnologie. 2nd, completely revised and corrected edition. dtv, Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-423-03259-9 , pp. 165-169.
  31. ↑ Lauk 2005, pp. 54-58.
  32. ↑ Lauk 2005, pp. 18, 27.
  33. ↑ Lauk 2005, pp. 17-18, 25.