Questions tagged [agriculture]
For questions related to history of farming and breeding animals.
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How did Egypt turn from "Breadbasket of the Mediterranean" to second-biggest importer of grain?
Egypt is currently undergoing a severe economic crisis. One key reason is that it is importing much of the grain needed to feed its population (and livestock), and this has become expensive/difficult ...
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After World War 2, why did European farmers switch from crop cultivation to grazing?
In George Marshall's speech announcing the Marshall Plan, he claims:
There is a phase of this matter which is both interesting and serious. The farmer has always produced the foodstuffs to exchange ...
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Why require every ploughman to make his own plough?
The answer to Why did it take so long for Europeans to adopt the moldboard plow? mentions that "Anglo-Saxon law required every ploughman to make his own plough" What was the reason for that?
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Why did it take so long for Europeans to adopt the moldboard plow?
According to the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas:
The design of the moldboard plow is so obvious that it seems
incredible that Europeans never thought of it. Until the Chinese
style plow ...
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What was the price of bread in France from 1789 - 1815?
I would really like to know the price of bread in France during the entire revolutionary and Napoleonic era. I am aware it was high in 1789, but couldn't find hard data for further years.
All my ...
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When did swamp/wetland conversion first begin, and what were the early methods for doing so?
I have been trying to do some research into the early history of humans using wetlands, but haven't had much luck. As I understand it so far, there are a number of methods of "wetland conversion&...
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Why did peasant serfdom last longer in Eastern Europe than in Western?
My concern is for the early-modern period, roughly 16th to 19th centuries. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia seem to provide the best known examples of long-lasting serfdom.
The article on ...
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What are "the unconscious first steps of plant domestication" in "Guns, Germs, and Steel"?
In chapter 6 of Guns, Germs, and Steel, "To Farm or Not to Farm" (p. 111), Jared Diamond says that primitive harvesting tools like flint blades and grinding slabs
were prerequisites to the ...
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Why are cereal grains so important to agriculture and civilization?
I was looking through a list of foodstuffs and noticed that nuts have far more energy content, fat content and protein content than cereals (relative to their mass). They don't seem to be especially ...
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Where did primitive settlements first start to occur outside of the Middle-East and Turkey? [closed]
Say when people as nomads, and started to form settlements with other people, where would these primitive settlements first started to appear, they would have first started to settle in regions around ...
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Why do certain foods (i.e. wheat and rice) dominate our carbohydrate intake? [closed]
Today most human consume wheat, rice, and to a less extent potato as the main carbohydrate source, even though there are other carbohydrate sources too (corn, barley, tapioca, etc). Why is that so?
...
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Did Persian Qanat water system influence Turpan Karez water system?
Based on Wikipedia, the Persian Qanat water system was started in cr. 1000 BC. The Turpan water system, located in modern north-west China, has a similar idea and later it was used on the Silk path ...
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What determines whether slavery is economically efficient in industrialized/modern era economies?
Various forms of slavery were nearly universal before the industrial revolution. After industrialization, it would naively seem forced labor would continue to be widespread, as there is no way to ...
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What percentage of the German population worked on gathering the harvest in 1917?
It is a well-known fact that Germany suffered from food shortage during World War I, and that there were several causes of this, including in no particular order:
The blockade restricting food ...
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How are historical nutrition data gathered?
In the book 'Sapiens', Yuval N. Harari mentions that after the Agricultural Revolution child mortality soared because of malnutrition. While I can see how eating only carbohydrate-based products leads ...
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How was agricultural labour organised in Victorian England?
I'm asking, more specifically, three things:
What might the leadership of a typical farm look like in terms of job titles and responsibilities?
Within a given farm, how were workers divided into ...
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Are there representation of wheat in the Gobekli Tepe temple?
While reading "Homo Sapiens" by Harari, I have been fascinated by the link made between wheat emergence and this prehistoric stone temple. A colleague told me about pseudo history in this book, so I ...
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Were there farms in the early 19th century in England, which only focused on agriculture?
I think back in the day most farms consisted of both agriculture and livestock, but I think, there must have been exceptions.
I'm also especially interested in small-scale family-based farms.
The ...
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Why was silage only invented in the 19th century?
For thousands of years in the Northern climates mankind had to slaughter a large proportion of their livestock due to a shortage of winter fodder.
What prevented mankind from using silage/haylage ...
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What were the characteristics of the earliest varieties of European cattle, "bos tauros", and how were they kept?
I know that all modern cattle, whether they are bos tauros or not, are descended from aurochs, and that aurochs were allowed to mix with early domesticated cattle several times. I want to know more ...
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How could it be that 80% of townspeople were farmers during the Edo period in Japan?
I've read in the book "A modern history of Japan" by Andrew Gordon and other articles, that most of the Japanese townspeople were farmers(about 80% I suppose) during the Edo period. But according to ...
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What is the significance of 4200 BCE in context of farming replacing foraging in Europe?
This is a question relating to how and, in particular, why foragers were colonized by farmers (settled societies) of Hilly Flanks (uplands of Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia).
According to Ian ...
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Why was agriculture more conducive to slavery in U.S. South than the North?
The most common explanation I hear for why there was more slavery in the South than the North in is that farming was more profitable in the South due to climate, soil quality etc. and the North had ...
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How young of a child could do significant labor?
I've been trying to find out whether, in some cultures historically, a child of age 3 or 4 could do enough work to "pay for their keep", so to speak.
In the search I've found out that modern child ...
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What is Street’s Jorrocks?
In the book “All Hell Let Loose” by Max Hastings, the writer mentions about the condition of British farmers during WWII:
"Wiltshire farmer Arthur Street ploughed up his grassland as the government ...
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What was the staple food of the natives of South East Asia before rice?
According to Wikipedia, history of rice, rice was first brought to South East Asia region across the caravan routes of the central Asian steppes. Now many of the subcontinental people of South East ...
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What was the average day like for a 15th century English peasant or agricultural Labourer?
Because I live in a major urban American city of nearly 500,000 (Colorado Springs), I am finding it difficult to wrap my head around the idea of medieval subsistence agriculture. I am particularly ...
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How did agricultural productivity change in Italy with the fall of the Roman Empire and through the early Middle Ages?
I have heard that overall agricultural productivity decreased with the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. In part at least it must be in relation to a general decrease of population - less people ...
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How much leisure time was enjoyed by English peasants in the 16th century?
It seems like technological advances like seed drills, the cotton gin, reapers (grain harvesters), John Deere tractors, nitrogen fixation, steam engines, the internal combustion engine, cars, aircraft,...
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why were animals domesticated? (for meat and fur) [closed]
So my understanding is that it was not until the industrial revolution until people could eat farm animals commonly, while hunter gatherer groups subsisted on meat as the main part of their diet, so I ...
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What did European people of the 5th century AD eat during spring and what was the availability?
It is commonly believed that winter during that age was a period of starvation, with very limited means of procuring food.
If the above is true, what did the commoners (peasants, serfs, etc) have to ...
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How and why buttermilk was added to English medieval butter?
My question engages in the history of butter. I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask but I will give it a try.
I read an old Jewish text (Sharei Dura 78) dated to the 13th century that ...
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How the average female body used to be before the industrial revolution? [closed]
I have this curiosity for several reasons.History articles says that before the isdustrial revolution most people used to be quite poor and most of the population were peasants. In other words, most ...
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When was the potato introduced to Mexico?
There are wild potatoes in Mexico, but eating potatoes are generally cultivars imported from the Andes. They became popular elsewhere after Europeans with sailing ships took them around the world. ...
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Why did Denmark, unlike in other 'rich' nations, favour agriculture in the 1920s?
According an article on the Economic History Association website, An Economic History of Denmark,
Structural development during the 1920s, surprisingly for a rich
nation at this stage, was in ...
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Did cows in Medieval times have calves in spring or all year round?
I'm a Dairy Educator and want to learn about milking and cows in Medieval Times. I suspect that cows had calves only in spring, like most livestock.
Am I correct?
Would Medieval people drink the ...
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How much smaller were medieval farm animals in England than today?
According the Medieval Life and Times website,
Farm animals were small, for scientific breeding had not yet begun. A
full-grown ox reached a size scarcely larger than a calf of to-day,
and the ...
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What changed to make British Enclosures more profitable than tenanted subplots?
In school I learned about the British Agricultural Revolution - at the time this was explained as 'increased efficiencies due to crop rotation'. (This now seems a bit simplistic.
We know that in ...
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Why were harvest times in Cyrenaica earlier than in Greece in antiquity?
In The Corrupting Sea (2000), the authors state that Cyrenaica's harvest time was "a month earlier than that of most of Greece and well before that of the Black Sea" (p. 72), and because of this the ...
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Why was sugar cultivation more profitable in the Caribbean/Brazil than West Africa?
The Atlantic slave trade involved the large-scale deportation of West African slaves to sugar plantations on the other side of the Atlantic.
Why was it more profitable to do that, rather than to ...
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What crops were part of the medieval spring harvest?
I am listening to a lecture series and the professor mentioned a "spring harvest" starting in mid to late March. I think this is a mistake - the winter crops were not harvested until the Summer - but ...
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Differences among foraging, cultivation, domestication
I am currently researching the transition from hunter-gathering bands to agricultural communities. I am coming across the word cultivation a lot. It's getting confusing, because sometimes the word ...
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Did Palaeolithic humans live longer than early Neolithic farmers?
Please quote published research.
There is work on Paleolithic teeth that is often used as evidence to suggest that Paleolithic humans lived longer than early farmers (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/...
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Kurds and their relation to the start of civilization?
Is there a relationship between these folks and the start of civilization? Mehrdad Izady suggests that they started civilization via establishing the agricultural production. How can this be possible, ...
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Did the food economy of the late Roman republic rely on foreign imports, or was it more localized?
I'm curious to what degree Rome of the late republic was fed by imports as opposed to local goods. (Rome in this case meaning the city and the Italian peninsula, as opposed to her client states and ...
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Did Peter the Great introduce the potato to Russia?
The essay "Tuber or not Tuber" claims with no citation:
Introduction of the tuber to Russia is usually credited to Peter the Great, who became familiar with potatoes while learning the shipbuilding ...
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How did horses become animals of fancy while donkeys largely didn't?
Horses seem to be a much more common sight in so-called "developed" (or rather "heavily mechanized") countries than donkeys are while the latter seem to be still quite popular in many "developing" ...
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In Alta California, who worked at the Ranchos del Rey?
In Spanish Alta California, most agricultural production was under the management and on the lands of the Franciscan Missions, operated with native labor. Each of the four presidios (forts) was also ...
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Why were there no agricultural, city-state forming civilizations in the Ice Age?
In spite of various fringe historians claiming to have found remains of Ice Age civilizations on lost continents, Atlantis and what not, there is - to the best of my knowledge - no tangible evidence ...
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If salt was scarce and expensive, how did people "salt the earth" to ensure their enemies would stay defeated?
A common theme through much of history seems to be ensuring that the recently defeated enemy cannot recover from the loss. A way to ensure that is restricting the ability to grow food -- i.e. "...
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