The advent and development of agriculture was an immensely important leap in the history of Humans as a species. There are different estimates as to exactly when we started farming and producing crops, however all the sources agree that doing so led to a revolution and allowed us to shift our focus from merely getting enough food to survive to building and developing more complex societies, ideas, and a myriad of other things that were not possible prior.
So, it comes as no surprise that as long as agriculture has been a part of our lives, we’ve been working to improve it. Increased crop yields, reduced pests, hardier plants – these are all desirable traits that our ancestors sought after, and though our methods have changed what we aim to achieve is much the same. However, contrary to what farming and agriculture looked like several thousands of years ago, we are changing the world around us and exploiting its resources in ways like never before. Advancements such as the development of crop rotation resulted in greatly increased yields that affected societies across the globe, but the possibilities that a better understanding of science has opened up has left us wanting more, even at the expense of the land we live in. Fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and GMO’s have allowed unprecedented yields and quality of food and has even allowed us to grow plants completely outside of their natural range; and while the idea of growing a tropical fruit or vegetable in Canada sounds like a great thing, it presents its own challenges, and often we deal with these challenges in ways that we only later realize are harmful.
Now that’s not to say that GMO’s, Pesticides, Herbicides, and other modern agricultural tools and techniques are all bad, in fact quite the contrary – they’ve allowed us to advance farming far beyond what our ancestors could have ever imagined. But the key is to use these tools responsibly, and rather than fight nature and try to dominate it, to work with it in an effort to increase production without harming the land we use.
What this looks like depends on many factors, but a good starting point is to plant crops that are native to an area, and to not overwhelm a location with a monoculture. In this way we can take advantage of the benefits that millions of years of adaptations that have formed, and not irreversibly change the environment and ecology in which we grow our food.
We’ve come a long way with agriculture, but we’ve still got a long way to go, and a large part of our future developments might just be the result of combining our past techniques with our current knowledge in an effort towards sustainability.
References:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/development-agriculture/
https://science.jrank.org/pages/1870/Crop-Rotation-History.html
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 