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Cultivation Crops: cultivation crops. cultivation crops is an ancient vineyard practice. It destroys weeds and facilitates other vineyard operations such as irrigation. Contrary to common belief, cultivation crops does not conserve soil moisture; however, the resulting destruction of weeds does conserve moisture. Discs or chisel-tooth cultivators are used, although some vineyards are still plowed. Heavy disc harrows are used to turn under weeds and cover crops. Weeds have been and are sometimes controlled with oil sprays or chemicals, usually diuron or monuron.
The intensive cultivation crops of fodder crops made it necessary to abandon the open field system and to make fenced enclosures, both to protect the growing crops and to contain the grazing animals. The four-course rotation [6] replaced the three-course rotation of open fields. This allowed higher productivity and the feeding of more domestic animals, which were also being slowly improved by selective breeding.
The widespread incidence of malnutrition is not primarily due to inadequate world food production. Rather it is due to the inequitable distribution between (and for that matter, within) nations of the food that the world produces. Today, the affluent one-third of the world's population eats well over half the food that is produced. It is not surprising then that amongst the remaining two-thirds malnutrition is rife and that a solution to this imbalance is urgently needed.
By the fourteenth century farmers in the Low Countries had begun more intensive cultivation crops of cropson the fallow land, mainly grains, root crops and fodder plants - clover, lucerne and rye-grass. The dye crops, madder, woad and saffron, were also cultivated. As mechanical skill developed, a method of drilling seed by machine instead of broadcasting by hand was invented and this was to be one of the foundations of modern mechanical farming. |
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