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Intensive Cultivation Dates: The last hundred pages of The Physical Earth are devoted to the fruits of the earth. Beginning with a history of agriculture, the first section deals with farming and farm equipment, soil, irrigation, ways of improving and protecting crops, and plant breeding. It was relatively recently—about 10,000 years ago—that man first domesticated animals and discovered how to cultivate and harvest plants. Intensive cultivation dates from the fourteenth century, mechanization from the nineteenth. Today, intensive farming has combined with mechanization to produce the factory farm.
6 Tropical vegetables
that now have a wide distribution are the aubergine [A] and the tomato [B]; they are fruits developed from flowers.
Vegetables lend themselves to small-scale cultivation in most parts of the world, by amateurs as well as professional cultivators;much of their production is still on small intensive holdings, largely run by family labour.
From the very beginning the availability of water was a major factor in determining the type and quality of the local agriculture. In many areas irrigation had to be practised from the beginning. However, coupled with the problem of irrigation was the nature and suitability of the soil. Man soon learned that intensive cultivation exhausted the soil and this reduced the value of irrigation. |
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