17 Agriculture and Peasantry

Khushi Pradhan and K.R. Rammohan

Contents:

    Introduction

The origin of agriculture

Intensive agriculture

Techniques employed by Intensive agriculture

• Irrigation
• Dry Farming

The Use of Other Subsistence Techniques

Changes in Scale caused by Intensive agriculture

Agricultural Lands

Agricultural Production

Labour Supplements

Technology

Demographic Changes

Social Organization

Political Institutions

Detrimental effects of New Technology

Contemporary use of Traditional Systems

Summary

Learning Outcomes:

In this chapter, the students will be able to learn:

• The origins of early forms of agriculture
• Intensive agriculture and its salient features
• Techniques employed by intensive agriculture
• Changes in scale caused by intensive agriculture in terms of land use, agricultural production, labour supplements, technology, demography, social organization and political institutions
• Detrimental effects of new technology on the environment
• Contemporary use of traditional farming systems

    INTRODUCTION

“The fundamental procedures of cultural ecology are as follows: first, the interrelationship of exploitative or productive technology and the environment must be analyzed.”

–  Steward 1955: 40

According to Julian Steward (1955), technology was the window between natural and human society and culture. Human beings are unlike other animals due to the presence of culture. The ordinary theories of biology and ecology cannot be employed without taking culture into account. Culture is a huge mass of socially acquired knowledge, concepts, and preferences. Many things like language, dress, religion, political opinion, customs, etc. are learned. Among all these parts of culture, technology is, according to Steward, the way that humans make a living in a world that links them directly to the rest of nature. Steward was a pioneer in cultural ecology, which is a branch of human ecology that studies the ways in which culture is used by people to adapt to their environment. He argued that the cultural aspect was associated with technology, which set humans and their cultures above and separate from the rest of the environment (Sutton and Anderson 2010). Steward’s main ideas are summarized in his concept of the culture core. The culture core consists of those features of culture that are illuminated by the technological window, and are related to the work of making a living in a particular environment. Steward developed his culture core concept to explain effects of environmental variations on human cultures, and the range of variation within subsistence types, as well as the differences between subsistence types.

Five types of societies were identified based on their basic subsistence technology or mode of production:

a)      Foragers (Food Gatherers)

b)      Higher Hunters

c)      Herdsmen and Pastoralists

d)      Simple cultivators/Horticulturalists

e)      Advanced cultivators/Intensive agriculture

This module deals with intensive agriculture and the technological, socio-political, and environmental changes accompanying it.

ORIGINS OF AGRICULTURE

The origin of agriculture is viewed as a long-term process of immense social, economic and historical significance. It transformed the operation of human communities within the last 10,000 years. These changes included a rise in population density, higher survival rate of humans, settlement and possession of individual property and wealth, but also generation and greater spread of diseases and other pathological conditions related to physical labour and poor diet.

The emergence of agriculture was not a sudden event, but rather a far more gradual process. A shortage of food resources – primarily the lack of wild animals for hunters – could have led to intended production of plants. Reasons for this include an increase in human population density along with decreases in big-game species because of overhunting. In the earliest phases of agriculture, the cultivated plants probably served as a kind of food reserve or an alternative source, in case of failure in hunting. Subsequently, crop production gained importance as the hunted animals became increasingly scarce. Complete dependence of humans on agriculture only emerged after wild animals and plants could no longer make significant contributions to the food supply of the growing population (Mayozer and Roudart 2006).

Agriculture is said to have appeared about 10,000 years ago in a few relatively small regions of the world during a phase in the climate that was accompanied by important changes in the living conditions of organisms, including humans. These first forms of agriculture were most probably practiced in the areas around dwellings and on fertile alluvial deposits due to receding flood waters. It involved the domestication of plants and animals, which entails purposeful and selective breeding for more of the desired traits and less of the unwanted ones. From there, Neolithic agriculture expanded across the world in systems of pastoral animal breeding and shifting cultivation. In arid regions, hydraulic agrarian systems, based either on annual floods or irrigation, were formed at the end of the Neolithic epoch in Mesopotamia, in the Nile and Indus valleys, and in the oases and valleys of the Inca Empire. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shifting cultivation was replaced by intensive agriculture (Mayozer and Roudart 2006).

Broadly, agriculture can be defined as the cultivation and/or raising and use of domesticated plants and animals. Within this general definition, the three major forms of agriculture can be placed – horticulture, pastoralism, and intensive agriculture. The differences between the three are largely a matter of scale (Sutton and Anderson 2010).

INTENSIVE AGRICULTURE

Intensive agriculture is a large-scale and complex system of farming and animal husbandry often involving the use of animal labour, equipment, water diversion techniques, and the production of surplus food. Intensive agriculture represents a significant shift in the scale and scope of agriculture and reflects an important modification in the relationship between people and the environment. The use of animals and machines to supplement human labour is noteworthy in intensive agriculture, although there are a few intensive systems that rely solely on human labour.

The agricultural system used in today’s nation states is relatively new, really coming into its own after World War II. This system is highly specialized, focusing on a relatively few species. At present, global agriculture uses about 2500 species of cultivated plants and a few hundred species of domesticated animals, but only several hundred cultivated species are prevalent. The dominant groups of cultivated plant species are cereals (wheat, rye, barley, rice, corn, etc.), pulses, roots and tubers, fruits, and vegetables. The dominant cultivated animal species are cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, camels, chickens and ducks (Lyuri 2010).

Intensive agricultural systems also employ components of the other subsistence strategies—hunting and gathering, horticulture, and pastoralism – but these tend to be minor components of the system. A consequence of increased development of agrarian technology is increased crop productivity, leading to higher population densities and increases in material wealth. Associated with these technical and demographic changes is a substantial increase in the social and political complexity of societies (Sutton and Anderson 2010).

Fig 1: The Gradual introduction of Agriculture

TECHNIQUES EMPLOYED BY INTENSIVE AGRICULTURE

Intensive agriculture utilizes multiple techniques, employing all of the primary methods used by all other groups, with intensive agriculture being much larger in scale. The major new techniques used by intensive agriculturalists are plough cultivation and irrigation. Ploughs do not necessarily intensify anything – they merely create opportunities – but irrigation is generally not worth doing unless it pays off in high yields. Some groups, however, irrigate wild plants (Lawton et al. 1976). Many irrigate very small-scale plots, such as vegetable gardens. Well-watered crops produce much greater yields than unirrigated crops. Higher crop yields can support more people, whose labour can help intensify agriculture to support even more people, and large numbers of people are a condition for the development of complex socio-political entities.

Irrigation

Irrigation generally involves the purposeful diversion of water from its natural source onto agricultural fields to provide water and any nutrients it may contain. Irrigation can be small-scale, such as the simple diversion of a small spring-fed creek onto a patch of grass, to very large scale, such as the construction of hundreds of miles of canals. Around 40 percent of the food produced in the world comes from the 16 percent of the agricultural land that is irrigated (Matson et al. 1997:506). A number of different types of irrigation systems are known. The first system is flood irrigation, also called natural or basic irrigation, and involves the use of floodwaters to cover and soak fields. While this methods results in the irrigation of fields, it is not true irrigation because no human constructions are used. Much of the irrigation of the Egyptian culture was flood irrigation. However, the Egyptians supplemented the natural flooding with pot irrigation and with the construction of basins to store floodwater. Genuine irrigation involves the construction of some facilities, such as dams, diversions, canals, wells, or other methods to purposefully divert water to fields. Rivers and/or streams might be diverted, channelled into canals, and delivered to fields many miles afar (Sutton and Anderson 2010).

Dry Farming

Dry farming is the production of crops relying on water from rainfall, and no constructed irrigation systems are used. Farming irrigated lands may have been the most important approach in early states, but today, about 84 percent of the world’s agricultural land, including pasture, is dry farmed. In many areas, rainfall is quite sufficient as a water source, and in some areas, fields have to have systems to drain excess water. In other regions, such as the central United States and most parts of India, crops are utterly dependent on rain, and a dry year can result in crop failure (Sutton and Anderson 2010).

The Use of Other Subsistence Techniques

a)   Hunting and Gathering

All cultures do some hunting and gathering, but such activities are usually much less important in intensive agricultural economies than in horticultural or pastoral groups. Most intensive agriculturalists use very small amounts of wild resources, but some, such as ocean fish, are now extracted on a vast scale, using fishing fleets and industrial complexes. The economies of some countries, such as Japan, Iceland, and the United States are highly dependent on ocean fish. In a number of instances, certain wild species, such as trout, have been domesticated and are now raised on farms.

b)   Horticultural Techniques

Small-scale agricultural plots and gardens still form an aspect of intensive agriculture, as can be seen by the numerous backyard gardens.

c)    Pastoral Techniques

Most farmers raise some animals for food, usually small species such as dogs, pigs, chickens, and guinea pigs. Intensive agriculturalists tend to raise much larger animals, such as cows, and while these are generally used for food, they are also used for a number of other purposes. These include production of various products such as leather, and for labour, for pulling ploughs. Most intensive agriculturalists employ a component of pastoralism (Galaty and Johnson 1990).

CHANGES IN SCALE CAUSED BY INTENSIVE AGRICULTURE

The most dramatic difference between horticulture and intensive agriculture is that of scale. Intensive agriculturalists generally cultivate larger quantities of land, have larger populations, and impact the environment to a much greater degree. The use of animals to supplement human labour significantly increased the scale and intensity of agriculture. The introduction of agricultural machines based on the internal combustion engine changed the scale again, this time in a massive way, ushering in contemporary industrialized agriculture.

Agricultural Lands

Agricultural lands consist of three main types – arable land (including cropland and fallows), land under permanent crops, and pastures and hayfields. The total area of agricultural lands in the world is 4973.4 million ha. They cover 33.3% of terrestrial surface, including 10.3% of arable land and land under permanent crops and 23% of pastures and hayfields, the largest area of agricultural lands are found in Asia and in Africa.

Throughout history, the area of agricultural lands has been continuously expanding in all parts of the world, except for short periods of wars, epidemics, crisis, etc. At present, the total agricultural area continues to rise, but the rate of this process has been decreasing since 1985.

Agricultural activity is the main process altering the plant canopy on earth. As a result of agricultural development, areas of Steppe and Savannah biomes have decreased by 7-10 times and the areas of forest biomes, by one-third. Australia, USA, China, Brazil, India, and Russia have the largest areas of natural ecosystems replaced by agricultural lands (Lyuri 2010).

Agricultural Production

The increase in agricultural input is accompanied by the rise in agricultural output. Asia is the greatest producer of agricultural products – it gives about 40-45% of the global agricultural output. China and India are the main driving forces of agricultural development in Asia. Only two regions can be compared to Asia – Europe (15-20% of the global agricultural output) and North America (10-15% of the global output, except for roots and tubers). Sub-Saharan Africa produces 15% of pulses and 25% of roots and tubers (Lyuri 2010).

In the second half of the twentieth century, world agricultural production has been growing steadily, but with dissimilar rates in different regions. However, the huge production does not mean sufficient consumption. Because of different populations and different food allowances, the individual level of food consumption does not coincide with agricultural production in the particular regions (Sutton and Anderson 2010).

Labour Supplements

In horticultural and pastoral societies, humans provided the vast majority of the labour needed to produce food, including the clearing of land, constructing fields, and planting and harvesting crops. However, as animals and machines began to supplement human labour, the scale of agriculture increased dramatically, and areas previously too difficult for agriculture could now be colonized by farmers, who often displaced the other groups already in those ecosystems. Animals were incorporated into some agricultural systems early on and quickly became an integral component of those systems. Human labour still remained important, but animals were able to do the work of many people by carrying heavy loads and pulling ploughs through heavy soils. While domesticated animals had been around for a long time, large animals were required to be useful for agricultural labour, as animals such as dogs are too small to pull ploughs. However, large domestic animals were not available in all societies. The few present in the New World, such as llamas in the Andes, were used as pack animals but not for agricultural labour. Thus, the intensive agricultural systems in the New World, such as the Maya system, were all based on human labour (Sutton and Anderson 2010).

Technology

Technological change has been an important aspect of the development of intensive agricultural systems. Technology has increased the efficiency with which farmers can grow crops and has opened new eco-zones to agriculture. A number of simple technological changes had significant impacts on farming, including the use of metal axes, which allowed forests to be cleared much faster than with stone axes.

The defining trait of agrarian technology is the presence of ploughs and draft animals. Ploughs were first used in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago. The first ploughs were simple ‘scratch ploughs’ whose physical effect on the soil was just to stir the top 10-15 cm of soil to prepare a seed bed. In light dry soils, these ploughs are quite sufficient to aerate the soil, provide a barrier to the evaporation of soil moisture, and destroy weeds. In semi-arid areas, scratch ploughing is all that is required to maintain permanent fields. The continued technological development of agrarian societies can be illustrated by the evolution of the plough. The mould board plough was an important innovation in the West before industrialization. It helps return downward-leaching nutrients to the surface, and is better at keeping heavy soils free of weeds in damp climates. Heavy ploughs were responsible for the medieval economic and socio-political revolution of Europe. They required several families to pool their oxen to form a team large and strong enough to pull them (Bharadwaj 1961).

More dramatic change can be seen with the development of machines powered by fossil fuels. Clearing a section of forest that would have taken many men a year with metal axes and horse-drawn wagons can now be done in a matter of days by a few men with gasoline-powered chainsaws and diesel-powered bulldozers. The machines changed the speed and efficiency of these activities and in doing so also changed the scale of environmental manipulation (Sutton and Anderson 2010).

Demographic Changes

The main demographic consequences of agrarian technology were simply a trend toward higher population densities and larger settlements. It also permitted urbanization of population to a greater extent than was possible under horticulture. This was because more productive farmers meant more people could pursue urban specialty occupations. Also, land and maritime transportation improvements made it possible to supply produce to cities with large populations, thus giving rise to large urban populations pursuing various occupations, thus having an impact on the culture of agrarian societies. Populations also fluctuated substantially every now and then, due to famines, disease epidemics and political breakdowns; on the other hand, during the periods of population rise, population densities often seem to have exceeded the level at which everyone could be productively employed at current levels of technology (McNeill 1982).

Social Organization

As carrying capacity and population increased, social organizations became more complex. As occupational specialization increased, new organizational principles were developed, such as markets for the exchange of the specialists’ products. A part of this increase in social complexity is the development of large-scale political and religious institutions.

The sexual division of labour remains fundamental to agrarian societies. Men’s labour becomes relatively more important, mainly because managing large animals like hunting is almost always men’s work. This economic importance of males is perhaps reflected in lower status for women. This is because in excluding women from agricultural work, their labour becomes devalued. In addition, agrarian societies generally have a strong patrilineal bias to the inheritance and hence ownership of property. These changed conditions in labour and ownership are reflected in marriage customs. Men in agrarian societies have to be compensated for taking on the responsibity of a wife, thus dowry is more frequent (Brown 1988).

Political Institutions

Human societies, which started off as bands and altered into chiefdoms as productivity increased, eventually evolved into states. A state is a society with elaborate social stratification and a hierarchical and complex political system that was highly centralized and internally specialized (Marcus and Feinman 1998:4). Many earlier researchers (Childe 1942; Steward 1955) used the term ‘civilization’ and included a number of other criteria, including urban centres, writing, monumental architecture, craft specialization, bureaucracies, codified law, and a central authority with the ability to use force following the law. All agricultural economies are based on a stable carbohydrate source, such as some sort of tuber or grain, and the agricultural systems of all state-level societies are based on some sort of grain crop. While grain crops provide a much greater caloric return per pound than root crops, root crops generally yield much more per acre, offsetting the grain advantage. However, tubers are difficult to store in the quantities needed by states.

DETRIMENTAL EFFECTS OF NEW TECHNOLOGY

The vast majority of labour in this system is provided by machines powered by fossil fuels, and new machines to replace human workers continue to be introduced. Fields are very intensively used, and their fertility is usually maintained through the use of chemical fertilizers. Fertilizers are necessary for restoring soil fertility. Organic fertilizers have been actively used throughout the history of agriculture. The application of mineral fertilizers began at the end of the nineteenth century. In 2005, their consumption reached 157 million tons annually. Diseases and pests are controlled by chemical pesticides. Chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides pollute water supplies and unintentionally kill many other plants and animals. The system also results in the large-scale alteration of habitat and in the loss of biodiversity (Lyuri 2010).

Without machines and equipment, modern intensive agriculture is impossible, because it involves many manipulations with agricultural land, cattle, etc. The rate and scale of environmental manipulation are much greater in intensive agriculture than in other systems, and one of the hallmarks of intensive agriculture is the active large-scale alteration of landscapes. Entire eco-zones have been so modified that they have little resemblance to their natural state. Whole valleys are flooded behind dams; entire forests are removed; rivers are rerouted; plant and animal species continue to be driven to extinction; entire cultures are absorbed. The list of impacts is long (Sutton and Anderson 2010). Also, more than 80 countries demonstrate a continuous reduction of agricultural lands. From 1961 to 2002, about 2.3 million square kilometres of agricultural lands was abandoned. Further, a lot of the soil on abandoned land is destroyed by erosion or other dangerous processes, which prevents the restoration of ecosystems (Lyuri 2010).

The use of tractors results in soil compaction on croplands and additional carbon dioxide emission because of the utilization of fossil fuels. Large-scale storage facilities and refrigeration allow crops to be stored for years, and so mitigate fluctuations in productivity due to drought or other conditions. A complex transportation and trade system allows these crops to be moved around the world with little difficulty. While this system is highly productive, it is also very polluting and inefficient. Further, the system is ultimately unsustainable (Sutton and Anderson 2010).

CONTEMPORARY USE OF TRADITIONAL SYSTEMS

Given the propensity of contemporary agriculture to destroy land and pollute water, many people are searching for alternative methods of food production. It is slowly being realized that some traditional techniques of agriculture can be highly productive and valuable, or even necessary, in many areas (Marten 1986), and ethnographers and agronomists are working together to document the vast storehouse of traditional agricultural knowledge (Atran 1993). Part of the problem is an arrogance on the part of Western development agents who believe that their practices must be superior. For example, on the island of Bali in the southern Pacific Ocean, traditional water management practices were replaced with contemporary techniques. However, these proved so much less successful than the traditional system that the contemporary innovations had to be abandoned (Lansing 1991). The traditional Chinese wet rice system is exceedingly efficient and productive, utilizing virtually all of the available resources within an area, but is being replaced by industrialized agriculture. This will result in a short-term increase in productivity but will ultimately make the land less productive. Fairhead and Leach (1996) showed that West African agriculture was not only far more sophisticated than had been assumed, but that it had actually created many of the groves that outsiders were trying to “protect” from ‘underdeveloped’ farming. Similar examples might be provided worldwide.

Summary

Intensive agriculture is large-scale farming, often involving the use of animal labour, equipment, water-diversion techniques, and the production of surplus food. Intensive agriculture represents a fundamental shift upward in the intensity of land use, increases in population, growth in the complexity of socio-political systems, and increases in the human impact on the environment. The change in agricultural intensity resulted in the growth in population, an increasing complexity in social and political organization, and eventually the development of state-level societies. Intensive agriculture employs all of the techniques of horticulture and pastoralism, plus supplemental labour and irrigation, all combined into a complex and interrelated system. Such systems are quite flexible and resilient and can support billions of people. After World War II, Western agriculture became increasingly industrialized and mechanized, with machines powered by fossil fuels providing much of the labour and manufactured chemicals much of the fertilizer. This type of agriculture is highly productive and has rapidly expanded to replace many traditional systems and to take over eco-zones previously unoccupied by farmers. Intensive agriculture has had a significant impact on the environment, much more than horticulture or pastoralism alone. Ecosystems become simplified, landforms significantly altered, and food economies more narrow. Ultimately, issues of pollution, dependency on fossil fuels, and population growth will make contemporary industrialized agriculture unsustainable in the long term. However, with the application of traditional systems of farming on modern agriculture, societies all over the world have the opportunity to make their agricultural systems more sustainable for future generations.

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    Suggested Readings

• Bocquet-Appel, Jean-Pierre. 2011. The agricultural demographic transition during and after the agriculture inventions. Current Anthropology 52(suppl. 4):S497–S510
• Butzer, K. 1971. Environment and Archeology, 2nd edn, Aldine, Chicago. Chile,V.G. 1951, Social Evolution. C.A.Watts, London,
• Clarke, W.C. 1966. From Extensive to Intensive Shifting Cultivation. Ethnology, 5 : 347-59.
• Colinvaux,P. 1973. Introduction to Ecology. John Wiley & Sons.
• Ellen, R. (1982) Environment, Subsistence and System: The Ecology of Small-Scale Social Formations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Hayden, B. 1992. Models of domestication. In Transitions to agriculture in prehistory. A. B. Gebauer and T. D. Price, eds. Pp. 11–19. Madison, WI: Prehistory.
• Head, L. 2000. Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Change. London: Arnold.
• Rappaport.R 1971 Nature, Culture, and Ecological Anthropology. In Man, Culture, and Society. H. Shapiro, ed. Pp. 237-268. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Wolf, E. 1966: Peasants. New York: Prentice-Hall.
• Worster, D. 1994: Nature’s economy: a history of ecological ideas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press