the science or art of cultivating the soil, growing and harvesting crops, and raising livestock. The art of making land more productive is practised throughout the world - in some areas by primitive methods and in other areas by employing cutting-edge scientific and technological methods. Agriculture provides employment to more of the world's aggregate manpower than all other occupations combined.
The origin of agriculture
Agriculture has no single, simple origin. At different times and in numerous places, many plants and animals have been domesticated. How many species passed into or out of domestication in prehistory is not known. Agriculture was long believed to have originated in the Middle East about 4000 BC. But modern dating techniques have proved otherwise, indicating that agriculture was already in progress circa 7000 BC. Agricultural development probably took place simultaneously in many areas and did not spread from a single centre.
Earliest beginnings
Nineteenth-century scholars hypothesized four stages in human development: (1) a savage stage in which all people were hunter-gatherers, (2) a herdsman or nomad stage during which man domesticated some animals, (3) a farming stage, and (4) civilization. Researchers have for long attempted to accurately date man's transition from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist or agriculturist. Many authorities believe that man's domestication of plants and animals caused changes in their physical forms and the presence or absence of such changes may indicate whether that animal or plant was domesticated at a particular time in the past. Hypothetically, a preliminary agricultural phase of intensive food gathering in the Middle East and in Asia over 6000 years ago was ascertained, when man passed from hunting and gathering to food producing or agriculture. Cattle were probably domesticated during this period or slightly earlier from the wild ox ( Bos taurus ), which stood 1.8 to 2.1 m high at the withers (the ridge between the shoulder bones).
Early development
The development of agriculture was intensification by man of his food extractive processes. More food could be obtained from a given area of land by encouraging plant and animal species found useful and discouraging others. 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 of which had long been known in scattered places, came into more general use.
Agriculture in the Indian subcontinent
India's most important contribution to world agriculture is rice ( Oryza sativa ), the staple food and crop of most of south, southeast, and east Asia. Sugar cane, varieties of legumes, and several tropical fruit such as mango and musk melon ( Cucumis melo ), are also native to the Indian subcontinent. Archaeological records of this region's prehistory are still incomplete. Evidence of how the transition from pastoralism to crop farming took place is lacking. Towards the close of the third millennium BC, in the alluvial plains of the Indus river, ruins of the cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa reveal an apparently sudden explosion of an organized, sophisticated urban culture. This society, known as the Indus or Harappan civilization, flourished until about 1750 BC and was much more extensive than those of Egypt or Babylonia and predated that of northern China. Peculiarly Indian, Harappan society was remarkably homogeneous, thoroughly individual and independent, and technically the peer of China and Egypt.
Nothing is known, however, about the farm communities that must have produced a surplus of agricultural products sufficient to sustain the population and fill the granaries of the metropolitan centres. At Harappa, for instance, the granary consisted of two blocks of six chambers each. The floor space of the 12 units covered an area of about 8,100 sq m.
Barley ( Hordeum vulgare ), a small-seeded, six-rowed variety, and two types of wheat - club wheat ( Triticum aestivum ) and an Indian dwarf variety ( T. sphaerococcum ) - were evidently the main cereal crops, supplemented by dates, sesame, field peas, and lentils. Humped Indian cattle and a humpless breed, goats, sheep, fowl, and the elephant had been domesticated. In addition to the domestication of a great variety of animals, fragments of dyed and woven cotton fabric attest to the antiquity of the cultivation of cotton plants and of the textile industry for which India was to become famous the world over.
No archaeological or pictorial evidence of farm implements has survived, and the Harappan script has waited long to be deciphered. It has been surmised, however, that the cereals could have been sown in the fall on inundated land after the annual flooding of the rivers had receded and then harvested in spring. The system is still in use and involves minimal skill, labour, and equipment. The land does not have to be ploughed, fertilized, or irrigated.
It was clearly more than a subsistence economy, for there is proof of river and sea traffic. There was a trading post at Lothal on the Gulf of Cambay with a brick dockyard and elaborate channel and spillway. Two-wheeled bullock carts and light, covered wagons - forms of transportation still common - were used for local travel. Caravans of pack oxen were the principal mode of transportation over longer distances.
South India, centre of the later distinctive Tamil culture, constituted a second, initially independent agricultural region. Crops were being raised there during the first half of the second millennium BC. Two varieties of pulses (legumes) and finger millet (also called ragi) were cultivated. To the north and west of the Deccan Plateau lay a third intermediate area. There, at Lothal and Rangpur, has been found the earliest evidence of rice cultivation, in the later Harappan period. Subsequently, wheat, cotton, flax, and lentils spread into the region from the Indus Valley, and pulses and millets from the south. In all three regions, the basic cropping pattern of the second millennium BC, except the pattern for rice, continued into the twentieth century.
A fourth agricultural region developed during the first millennium BC in the Gangetic Valley. Waves of invading Indo-Aryan tribes presumably destroyed the Harappan cities and penetrated deep into Hindustan proper, the principal seat of the classical Indian civilization. With the Aryans came the horse, coinage, the Brahmi script, and the entire corpus of Vedic literature. Sources of information from this point are literary rather than archaeological. The plough, for example, figures in a hymn of the most ancient of the texts, the Rigveda: "Harness the ploughs, fit on the yokes, now that the womb of the earth is ready to sow the seed therein…" Apparently, rice played an important role in the growth of population and new settlements. They had spread eastwards to the Ganga delta by the seventh century BC.
In the later Vedic texts (c. 1000-500 BC), there are repeated references to iron. Cultivation of a wide range of cereals, vegetables, and fruits is described. Meat and milk products were part of the diet; animal husbandry was important. The soil was ploughed several times. Seeds were strewn. Fallowing and a certain sequence of cropping were recommended. Cow dung provided the manure. Irrigation was practised.
A more secular eyewitness account is available from Megasthenes (c. 300 BC), a Greek envoy to the court of the Maurya Empire. In his four-volume Indica , he wrote: "India has many huge mountains which abound in fruit-trees of every kind, and many vast plains of great fertility… The greater part of the soil, moreover, is under irrigation, and consequently bears two crops in the course of the year… In addition to cereals, there grows throughout India much millet... and much pulse of different sorts, and rice also, and what is called bosporum (Indian millet). And again, Since there is a double rain-fall (i.e., the two monsoons) in the course of each year... the inhabitants of India almost always gather in two harvests annually."
Other sources reveal that the soils and seasons had been classified and meteorological observations of rainfall charted for the different regions of the Maurya empire, which comprised nearly the whole subcontinent and territory to the northwest.
A special department of the state supervised the construction and maintenance of the irrigation system. The best-known work of the period is Sudarshana lake in Kathiawar, created by an artificial dam and furnished with conduits. Roads, too, were the government's responsibility. The swifter horsedrawn chariot provided greater mobility than the bullock cart.
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 the time of the Upanishads (c. 600-300 BC).
The crops were broadly divided into rice zones and wheat and millet zones. Rice predominated in the eastern states, on the southwest coast, and in Kashmir. Apart from its original home in Gujarat, it had spread also to the Punjab and Sind with the aid of irrigation. Wheat grew throughout its 'natural' region in north and central India. Millets were cultivated in the wheat areas and in the drier districts of Gujarat and Khandesh as well.
Cotton, sugar cane, indigo, and opium were major cash crops; the last two have since passed out of cultivation. Introduced by the Portuguese, the cultivation of tobacco spread rapidly. The Malabar coast was the home of spices, especially black pepper, that had stimulated the first European adventures in the East. Coffee had been imported from Abyssinia and became a popular beverage in aristocratic circles by the end of the century. Tea, which was to become the common man's drink and a major export, was yet undiscovered, though it was growing wild in the hills of Assam. Vegetables were cultivated mainly in the vicinity of towns. New species of fruit, such as the pineapple, papaya, and the cashew nut, were also introduced by the Portuguese. The quality of mango and citrus fruits was greatly improved.
Cattle continued to be important for draft and milk. According to a Dutch observer, however, the cows gave far less milk than in his country. Land use never became as intensive as in China and the Far East, although, as noted by Megasthenes, double (and even triple) cropping was fairly common in regions favoured with irrigation or adequate double rainfall. Though the population must have increased many times over since Maurya times, in the seventeenth century virgin land was still abundant and peasants were scarce.
Irrigation from wells, tanks, and canals, however, had greatly expanded. Some new water-lifting devices - such as the sakia , or Persian wheel, which consisted of a series of leather buckets on an endless rope yoked to oxen - had been adopted and are still widely used.
The plough was the principal implement for tillage. Drawn by oxen, the traditionl Indian plough has never had a wheel or a mouldboard. The part that penetrates the soil is a wedge-shaped block of hardwood. The draft pole projects in front, where it is attached to the neck yoke of the bullocks. A short, upright stilt in the rear serves as a guiding handle. The point of the wedge, to which an iron share may or may not be attached, does not invert the soil. Some ploughs are so light that the cultivator can carry them daily on his shoulder to and from the fields. Others are heavy, requiring teams of four to six pairs of oxen. Levellers and clod crushers, generally consisting of a rectangular beam of wood drawn by bullocks, are used to smooth the surface before sowing. Among hand tools, the most common is the kodali, an iron blade fitted to a wooden handle with which it makes an acute angle.
Drill sowing and dibbling (making small holes in the ground for seeds or plants) are old practices in India. An early seventeenth-century writer notes that cotton cultivators "push down a pointed peg into the ground, put the seed into the hole, and cover it with earth-it grows better thus". Another simple device was a bamboo tube attached to the plough. The seed was dropped through the tube into the furrow as the plough worked, and was then covered by the soil in making the next furrow.
Operations of reaping, threshing, and winnowing have continued to be performed almost exactly as described in the Vedic texts. Thus, grain is harvested with a sickle. It is bound in bundles and threshed by bullocks treading on it or by hand pounding. To separate the grain from the chaff, it is either sieved with sieves made of stalks of grass or of bamboo, or it is winnowed by pouring by hand at a height from a supa (winnowing scoop). The grain is then measured and stored. The sickle, sieve, and supa remain today as they were more than two millennia ago.
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