Agriculture

• 1. Introduction

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  Agriculture began when nascent farmers started planting grains around 11,500 years ago, even though humans had been gathering wild grains for at least 105,000 years before that. That gap of roughly 90,000 years separates the act of picking food from the world from the act of making the world grow it. Once farming of domesticated plants and animals produced food surpluses, people could stop wandering and live in cities. Today the practice covers cultivating soil, planting, raising, harvesting, and livestock production, with some definitions stretching to forestry and aquaculture. It now extends over 4.8 billion hectares, the equivalent of one-third of the Earth's land surface. Plants were cultivated independently in at least 11 regions of the world, which raises a strange question. How did so many separate peoples, with no contact, arrive at the same idea at roughly the same moment? And what did it cost the planet when they did?

• 2. Eleven Beginnings

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  In the Paleolithic Levant, 23,000 years ago, people cultivated emmer, barley, and oats near the sea of Galilee, long before farming spread. The story of agriculture is not one origin but many, scattered across at least 11 separate centers. Rice was domesticated in China between 11,500 and 6200 BC, with the earliest known cultivation from 5700 BC, followed by mung, soy, and azuki beans. Sheep were domesticated in Mesopotamia between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago. Cattle came from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan some 10,500 years ago, while wild boar were first domesticated about 10,500 years ago across Eurasia.

  In the Andes of South America, the potato was domesticated between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago, alongside beans, coca, llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs. Sugarcane and some root vegetables were domesticated in New Guinea around 9,000 years ago. Sorghum was domesticated in the Sahel region of Africa by 7,000 years ago. In Mesoamerica, wild teosinte was bred into maize from 10,000 to 6,000 years ago. Cotton was domesticated in Peru by 5,600 years ago and independently in Eurasia. The horse, by contrast, was domesticated in the Eurasian Steppes around 3500 BC, far later than the first crops.

• 3. Civilizations Of Mud And Water

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  The Sumerians started to live in villages from about 8000 BC, relying on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and a canal system for irrigation. Ploughs appear in their pictographs around 3000 BC, and seed-ploughs around 2300 BC. Their farmers grew wheat, barley, lentils, onions, dates, grapes, and figs. Ancient Egyptian agriculture leaned on the Nile River and its seasonal flooding, with grains such as wheat and barley grown beside industrial crops like flax and papyrus after 10,000 BC.

  In China, from the 5th century BC, there was a nationwide granary system and widespread silk farming. Water-powered grain mills were in use by the 1st century BC. By the late 2nd century, heavy ploughs had been developed with iron ploughshares and mouldboards, and these spread westwards across Eurasia. In the Americas, the Aztecs built irrigation systems, terraced hillsides, fertilized their soil, and developed chinampas, the artificial islands. The Mayas farmed swampland with extensive canal and raised field systems from 400 BC.

  In North America, indigenous people developed a system of companion planting called the Three Sisters, pairing winter squash, maize, and climbing beans. The Gunditjmara and other Australian groups built eel farming and fish trapping systems from some 5,000 years ago, evidence that the line between hunter-gatherer and farmer was never as sharp as once assumed.

• 4. The Great Acceleration

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  After 1492, the Columbian exchange carried maize, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and manioc to Europe, while wheat, barley, rice, turnips, and livestock crossed to the Americas. Before that, exchange with Al-Andalus during the Arab Agricultural Revolution had already brought sugar, rice, cotton, and fruit trees such as the orange into European fields. From the 17th century, the British Agricultural Revolution advanced irrigation, crop rotation, and fertilizers, allowing the global population to rise significantly.

  The Haber-Bosch method let industry synthesize ammonium nitrate fertilizer on a large scale, lifting crop yields and sustaining further population growth. The Green Revolution between the 1960s and 1980s transformed farming worldwide, with grain production rising between 70 and 390 percent for wheat and 60 to 150 percent for rice, depending on the region, as world population doubled. Plant selection and breeding in New Zealand improved pasture in the 1920s and 1930s. X-ray and ultraviolet induced mutagenesis during the 1950s produced modern commercial varieties of wheat, corn, and barley. The cost of this leap was paid in fossil fuels, since the very production of nitrogen fertilizer can account for over half of agricultural energy usage.

• 5. Small Hands, Vast Land

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  Five of every six farms in the world consist of fewer than 2 hectares, yet they take up only around 12 percent of all agricultural land. Small farms, the vast majority of them one hectare or smaller, produce about one-third of the world's food. The arithmetic of who farms and who owns runs in opposite directions. While only 1 percent of all farms globally are greater than 50 hectares, they hold more than 70 percent of the world's farmland, and nearly 40 percent of global agricultural land sits on farms larger than 1,000 hectares.

  Agriculture employed 873 million people in 2021, about 27 percent of the global workforce, and 916 million in 2023, down from 1,027 million in 2000. The service sector overtook agriculture as the largest global employer in 2007. An estimated 2.5 billion subsistence farmers worked in 2018, cultivating about 60 percent of the earth's arable land. Around the world, women make up a large share of this population, 47 percent of the agricultural workforce in sub-Saharan Africa. On average, women earn 18.4 percent less than men in wage employment in agriculture, receiving 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. The gender gap in land productivity between female and male managed farms of the same size is 24 percent.

• 6. A Hazardous Trade

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  The International Labor Organization considers agriculture one of the most hazardous of all economic sectors, estimating an annual work-related death toll among agricultural employees of at least 170,000, twice the average rate of other jobs. A common cause of fatal injuries on industrialized farms in developed countries is tractor rollovers. Because families often share the work and live on the farm itself, entire households can be at risk of injury, illness, and death.

  Ages 0 to 6 may be an especially vulnerable population in agriculture, with drowning, machinery, and motor accidents among the common causes of fatal injuries among young farm workers. Occupational fatality data from the last decade show that, across all industries, agriculture had the leading number of work-related deaths for youth, and within the industry, youth between the ages of 10 and 15 suffered the most non-fatal injuries. Pesticides and chemicals add their own danger, with workers exposed to them risking illness or children with birth defects. The World Health Organization estimated in 1992 that three million pesticide poisonings occur annually, causing 220,000 deaths.

• 7. The Weight On The Land

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  Livestock production occupies 70 percent of all land used for agriculture, or 30 percent of the land surface of the planet, and is responsible for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalents. A senior UN official, Henning Steinfeld, said that livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. The sector produces 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the global warming potential of CO2, and 37 percent of all human-induced methane. In the Amazon basin, 70 percent of previously forested area is now occupied by pastures.

  Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of freshwater withdrawals worldwide, a figure predicted to rise. Aquifers in northern China, the Upper Ganges, and the western US are being depleted, with new research extending the problem to Iran, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. An estimated 64 percent of agricultural land is at risk of pesticide pollution, which destroys pollinators and harms soil microbiota. Agricultural expansion remains the primary driver of global deforestation, accounting for nearly 90 percent of forest loss. Plastics deepen the damage too, with mulch residue measured at 50 to 260 kilograms per hectare in topsoil where mulch use dates back more than 10 years.

• 8. Feeding 2050

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  Agriculture needs to produce about 50 percent more food, feed, and fibre by 2050 compared with the volumes generated in 2012, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The challenge is to grow more from resources that are already overstretched. Global agricultural production currently amounts to approximately 11 billion tonnes of food, 32 million tonnes of natural fibers, and 4 billion cubic metres of wood, yet around 14 percent of the world's food is lost before it reaches the retail level.

  Climate change is reshaping the map of what can grow where. In a 2022 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change described how human-induced warming has slowed growth of agricultural productivity over the past 50 years in mid and low latitudes. At 1.5 degrees of warming, close to 50 percent of cropland in the Middle East and North Africa region is already in danger. In 2021, farmers discovered stem rust on wheat in the Champagne area of France, a disease that had previously only occurred in Morocco for 20 to 30 years. Insects that once died off over the winter are now alive and multiplying, a sign that the next chapter of agriculture will be written by a warming world as much as by the farmers within it.