In A World History of Agriculture authors Marcel Ma
zoyer and Laurence Roudart have come up with a theory of the evolution and differentiation of agrarian systems, providing an account of the most widespread and longest-lasting forms of agriculture.While they succeed at presenting a lot of valuable information and perspective through this colossal undertaking, they fail at readability. Incapable of reading the original French publication, I can't say how much of the blame lay at the feet of the authors and how much on James Membrez's English translation. The issue of linguistic eloquence (or lack thereof) is such a shame because I whole heartedly agree with the authors' assertion that anyone attempting to impact the direction of global agriculture must be “grounded in a systematic knowledge of the organization, function and, dynamics of different sorts of agricultural systems.” (pg. 21)
As a beginning farmer sorting through growing models for the most environmentally, economically and socially sustainable ones I have felt increasingly that I needed historical context to understand where I am and where to go. For this reason I trudged through A World History of Agriculture cursing the run-on sentences and lack of clear outline while reading on in agreement that their “theory of agrarian systems is an intellectual tool that enables us to comprehend the complexity of each form of agriculture and to explain in broad terms the historical transformation and geographical differentiation of human agriculture.” (pg. 46)
I offer the following chapter by chapter summary and review as a tool for those who also desire a methodical knowledge of agricultural history but have more pressing things to do than slog through Mazoyer and Roudart's six hundred very dry pages.
Introduction
Twenty-first century farmers are at a very strange point in human history. Agricultural technology and global food markets have developed so rapidly over the past two hundred years that practicing the farming methods of one's grandparents (much less of one's distant ancestors) is rarely economically or culturally viable. In A World History of Agriculture, from the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis, Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roundart assert that, particularly in such a unique time, a theory of agrarian systems is as essential to the study of agriculture as Darwin's systematic classification and theory of evolution of living species was essential to the study of biology.
Mazoyer and Roudart warn that “the greatest peril of our epoch is that the reduction in agricultural employment will continue to prevail over the creation of employment in other sectors of the economy and, as a result, unemployment and poverty will spread on a global level much faster than employment and material well-being.” We therefor need thoughtful, informed, sustainability-minded people behind desks researching and implementing plans to go head-to-head with other, more short-sighted and power obsessed, people behind desks, and I certainly hope those individuals read this book cover to cover. However, farmers themselves also need a strong education in the history of world agriculture, and they are distinctly not the audience Mazoyer and Roudart were writing for in their barely readable beast of a book.
Twenty-first century agrarian systems that avoid epidemics of poverty and the environmental degradation that exacerbates it are hard to come by but a growing group of farmers is on the search. A deeper understanding of agricultural history would go a long way in the hands of the many modern farmers who actively try to escape a dichotomy that pits technology against tradition and immediate prosperity against sustainability. In the hands of the many less enlightened modern farmers who currently make little or no effort toward solving the paradoxes of agriculture in our time, a good history lesson is even more pressing.
Alas, we will hope for the future publication of an equally estimable, but vastly more readable, history of world agriculture geared toward farmers, perhaps available for audio download so farmers can learn while seeding or harvesting. For now, however, we will have to grapple with Mazoyer and Roudart's writing in order to access their extremely useful content.
The following is how Mazoyer and Roudart see a general timeline of agricultural history. The neolithic agricultural revolution occurred at lease 10,000 yrs ago and expanded across the world in two principal forms- slash and burn agriculture and pastoral animal breeding. Post- Forest Agrarian Systems developed after slash and burn agriculture resulted in massive planetary deforestation. These post-forest systems are differentiated according to climate and are each the origin of distinct and relatively independent evolutionary series.
In arid regions such as Mesopotamia, the Nile and Indus valleys, and oases valleys of the Inca empire hydraulic systems based on annual floods or irrigation developed. In humid regions such as parts of China, India, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and Madagascar hydraulic systems based on aquatic rice-growing developed. In intertropical regions such as the Congolese plateaus, East Africa, and the Sahel, varied savanna systems developed. In the temperate regions of Europe a series of systems developed that gave birth to what Mazoyer and Roudart term the agricultural revolution of antiquity which employed systems of rainfed cereal cultivation with fallowing, pasturage and animal herding, manual tools such as spade and hoe and animal drawn cultivation with the ard.
The agricultural revolution of the middle ages was a further development of this system that included fallowing and animal-drawn cultivation using wagons and plows. The technological development that led to the first agricultural revolution of modern times in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries involved the use of soil building green manures rather than fallowing. During the so called “voyages of discovery”, European agrarian systems were enriched by the introduction of American plants like potatoes and corn and its systems were extended to settler colonies in temperate regions of the Americas, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
In the tropical regions, agro-exporting plantations developed within preexisting systems, with specialized systems for mono-cropping plants such as sugarcane, cotton, coffee, cacao, palm oil, and bananas. The second agricultural revolution of modern times was the last in an evolutionary series of agrarian systems developed in temperate regions and it produced the motorized mechanized specialized systems of today with their reliance on synthetic chemicals and fossil fuels. Mazoyer and Roudart describe the resulting agrarian and general crisis thus,
From the end of the nineteenth century, with revolution in transport, all of (the world's) agrarian systems progressively confronted each other in the same increasingly unified world market that daily revealed all kinds of inherited inequalities and their resulting disparities in productivity and income. Then, in the twentieth century, productivity gains from the second agricultural revolution were so enormous that they entailed a significant lowering of real prices for most agricultural commodities. … The ratio between the gross productivity labor in the least productive manual agriculture and that of the most productive motorized and mechanized agriculture has increased by several dozen times going from 1 to 10 in beginning of 20th century to 1 to more than 100 today.
If the essential problem of the world economy today truly lies in the destructive confrontation between the very different and unequally productive agricultures that form the agrarian heritage of humanity, then the solution to the contemporary general crisis necessarily lies in a coordinated policy on the world scale that would allow poor farmers to support themselves and develop. This policy must be one that would finally make it possible to to end the rural exodus, growing unemployment and poverty.
To give or return to all types of agrarian systems inherited from the past the possibility of participating in the construction of a viable future for humanity is the true way to resolve the general crisis of the contemporary world economy. Pgs. 23-25
Chapter 1: Evolution, Agriculture, History
Unlike several species of tropical American ants, whose only means of survival is the cultivation of a particular species of domestic fungus or the breeding of a certain aphid species, humans are not strictly suited for agriculture. We do not posses anatomical tools or innate knowledge that dictates our agrarian heritage. Rather the primary advantage of humans is that, after millions of years of hominization, we have biological and cultural characteristics- such as complex, voluminous brains, language capable larynxes and the ability to make tools- that make us very adaptable to and able to densely populate different environments. Homo sapiens sapiens became farmers when, about 10,000 years ago, they encountered limiting factors for their population growth as hunter-gatherers and overcame them by planting crops and breeding animals.
From that Neolithic Agricultural Revolution launched a wellspring of different types of agriculture, dramatically variable in time and space and informing one another in complex ways. Authors Mazoyer and Roudart attempt to assemble a theory of the evolution of agrarian systems as “a tool that makes it possible to represent the continual transformations of agriculture in a region of the world as a succession of distinct systems, forming a definite historical series... making it possible to apprehend, analyze, understand, and explain an infinitely complex, extremely diversified and constantly changing reality.” (pg. 51)
Before studying the author's theory of the evolution of agrarian systems, much less using that theory as a tool for studying the implications of today's agricultural landscape, I found it important to tease out exactly what Mazoyer and Roudart mean by the term “agrarian system.”
They break each system down into two principal subsystems. Cultivated ecosystems are composed of gardens, plowed fields, mowed meadows, grazed pastures, and forests all of which must be maintained by suppressing wild vegetation, renewing fertility, and managing crops through planting, harvesting, watering, breeding, herding and so on. Such maintenance ensures the internal circulation of matter and energy in the cultivated ecosystem and opens it up to external changes with ecosystems nearby such as erosion/ deposition of sediments or the transfer of fodder or fertility.
Social productive systems are composed of human resources such as labor and knowledge, inert resources such as equipment and infrastructure and living resources such as cultivated plants and domestic animals. This is the technical, economic or social system and it is used to create or expand the activities involved in renewing or exploiting the cultivated ecosystem.
As heterotrophs, all animals, including humans, are incapable of synthesizing bio-mass. In order to survive we must consume plants which are autotrophs and can synthesize bio-mass from solar energy, carbon dioxide, water and minerals through photosynthesis, or we must consume other animals that have already eaten plants. Hunters and gatherers live off of biomass taken from wild species whereas it is the business of agriculture to domesticate and cultivate plants that can efficiently synthesize bio-mass for us and/or animals from whom we will acquire the bio-mass second had.
The success of an agrarian population depends on the ability of the social productive system to maintain a high capacity within the cultivated ecosystem for the long-term synthesis of bio-mass. This maintenance requires the restoration of water, tilth, and organic and mineral matter to the soil in quantities sufficient to make up for the losses caused by its cultivation. The methods of renewing fertility are therefore a definitive factor for agrarian systems.
Fertilizers are materials that are incorporated into soil for the purpose of providing plants with the nutrition they need to grow. They are either minerals, such as those extracted from rock or synthesized in a laboratory, or they are organic such as manure, compost, and raw plant matter. In a healthy agrarian system, organic fertilizers are progressively released and absorbed in summer while in winter they are reserved so they don't leach out. They feed the soil solution in a more complete and balanced manner than mineral fertilizers because, in addition to the macronutrients Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, Calcium, Magnesium, and Sulfur, they often contain the trace elements of iron, manganese, zinc, copper, boron, molybdenum, and chlorine and they are alive with microorganisms that support healthy plant growth.
Soil Amendments are organic or mineral materials that are incorporated into soil for purpose of improving its composition and physical and chemical properties.
Mazoyer and Roudart have broken down the historical methods of fertility renewal in agrarian systems into seven broad categories:
allowing wild vegetation to reconstitute itself between periods of cultivation (Chapter 3)
pasturing animals on marginal, uncultivated lands (called the saltus) during the day and then penning them in cultivated land (called the ager) at night to deposit their excrement (Chapter 6)
mowing part of pasturage to feed stabled livestock and transferring manure from stable to cultivated land(Chapter 6)
growing green manures that produce a lot of biomass and fix mineral matter, then either burying the green manure in cultivated lands or feeding it to animals whose excrement you transfer to cultivated lands (Chapter 8)
maintaining large trees above cultivated ground so roots draw out mineral elements from deep in the soil and return them to ground either directly through falling leaves/branches or indirectly through excrement of animals who eat the trees (Chapter 3 and Chapter 7)
directing flood and irrigation waters that are full of alluvial deposits and soluble minerals from the other areas onto cultivated lands (Chapter 3 and Chapter 4)
transporting organic and mineral fertilizers from afar into the cultivated ecosystems (Chapter 4, Chapter 5 and Chapter 10)
The overpopulation of an ecosystem is not absolute and in the case of agrarian human populations, it is relative to the capacities of the agrarian system to produce biomass at a given point in time and to renew the fertility of its land for the future.
For example, on the eve of the neolithic agricultural revolution the world was already overpopulated in relation to the survival means available from contemporary systems of predation. The development of proto-cultivation and then slash-and-burn agriculture dramatically increased the population's ability to grow. Likewise, in the tenth century, with 10 million inhabitants, France was afflicted with famine. Three centuries later, after adopting a more productive cultivation system based on the animal drawn plow, it fed nearly twenty million. The evolution of agrarian systems has allowed the continual overall growth of human populations over the past ten thousand years. While there is certainly a limit to the planetary capacity for production of consumable biomass, it is impossible to estimate when and how agrarian systems will meet that insurmountable boundary to expansion.
Chapter 2: The Neolithic Agricultural Revolution
According to Mazoyer and Roudart, an agricultural revolution is when a new means of production engenders new cultivated ecosystems and social productive systems. The first such agricultural revolution occurred about ten thousand years ago during the neolithic age.
The first farmers appeared in four different centers of origin- Near Eastern, Central American, Chinese, and New Guinean- more or less contemporaneously (give or take a millennium). The latest archaeological evidence suggests that this world wide revolution came about as a result of a dynamic interaction of technical, ecological and cultural conditions that were particular to time and place.
Mazoyer and Roudart focus their attention on the Near Eastern center of origin to the near exclusion of the others, presumably because more research has been done there although they never explicitly say so. In the Near Eastern center of origin, the transition from predation to agriculture lasted more than one thousand years. Around twelve thousand years ago, the post-glacial warming of the fertile crescent led to a progressive shift from a tundra ecosystem, where humans hunted reindeer, to a warmer climate dominated by oaks, pistachios, wild grains, legumes, and wild game. This abundance led the human population to expand and take up a more sedentary lifestyle, building houses in villages and collecting wild grains and legumes to make up a mostly vegetarian diet. The villagers created specialized tools such as sickles, grinding stones, mortars and pestles, hearths and ceramics.
Domestication appears to be the unpremeditated final result of proto-cultivation and proto-breeding as humans successively selected the most successful plants and animals for their systems. Probably, humans discovered their ability to purposefully grow plants by observing the accidental seeding of grains near their homes during the shelling and cooking process. They began selecting and planting the seeds of their favorites of these volunteer plants and, over the course of many generations, the domesticated varieties held characteristics more advantageous to human cultivation than to wild propagation. Characteristics of domesticated cereal crops included quick germination, because while seeds that lay dormant for years can be successful in wild systems they miss the boat of annual cultivation in agrarian systems; predictable flowering time, such that harvest of an entire crop could be carried out at one time; and grains with this hulls such that they hold on the plant rather than shattering and sowing themselves before harvest.
In this chapter, Mazoyer and Roudart address the oft spouted assertion that hunter-gatherers spent less time working to feed themselves than do farmers, arguing that this is only true when the population of hunter-gatherers is relatively low compared to available wild food, as it was well before the neolithic agricultural revolution but not during it. When a given territory is highly populated, which the first villages of neolithic humans in the fertile crescent quickly became, the necessary predation time for an individual hunter-gatherer drastically increases because they have to compete with other humans. In such circumstances the environment becomes over-exploited, reducing the ecosystem's production capacity and further increasing predation time, and agriculture becomes much less time consuming than hunting and gathering.
Profound social and cultural changes made the change from hunting and gathering to an agrarian lifestyle possible. Language and social organization were necessary to deal with such complicating factors as saving seed and young animals for breeding out of the consumable harvest. As plantings of barley, peas, lentils, chickpeas, vetch and flax, as well as the domestication of animals, became more ambitious, newly developed axes of polished stone were used to clear forests for agricultural lands.
The centers of origin likely expanded primarily through colonization and secondarily through the transfer of technology to neighboring populations. Five thousand years ago the Near Eastern center and its domesticated spelt, wheat, barley, peas, lentils, flax, goats, pigs, sheep and cattle species had spread to the eastern and western rivers of the Mediterranean and into central and northwest Europe, India and central Africa. By about three thousand years ago it came into contact with agriculture of Chinese origin, based on millet, which had spread all over east Asia and had encountered agriculture from the expanding New Guinean center of origin, based on taro, in southeast Asia. By one thousand years ago agriculture of Central American origin, based on maize, spread across South and North America as far north as the Great Lakes.
Unfortunately, systems of writing did not develop until thousands of years after the neolithic agricultural revolution. It would be fascinating to have a written record of this sweeping revolution in which human beings slowly, steadily, domesticated a range of wild species and developed an unprecedented lifestyle of cultivation. This emergence of humans as heavy handed land managers would come to dramatically shape the environment and species of earth.
Chapter 3: Systems of Slash-and-burn Agriculture in Forest Environments: Deforestation and the Formation of Post-Forest Ecosystems
Over time, the domestic space of villages and privileged lands fertilized by alluvial deposits of floods into forested ecosystems became insufficient for expanding groups of early farmers. Stone age tools such as polished stone axes were useful for cutting small trees and shrubs, thus people were able to partially clear forest land for cultivation but were not able to clear grasslands, which were primarily used for animal breeding. The systems of slash-and-burn that developed from these conditions involved the removal of dominant forest plants, the burning of vegetation and then the sowing of crops.
In such a system, land must be idled for a sufficient period of time after harvest for vegetation to regrow, synthesizing enough biomass to renew fertility in the system.. The amount of idle time necessary is variable depending on the size of the population to be supported in relation to available land. “Performance varies greatly as a function of the length of the rotation and the size of the cultivated ecosystem's biomass.” (pg 114) If land is plentiful, a given parcel can be left idle for long stretches of time while cultivation is rotated through alternative parcels, making for a system that can sustain its biomass indefinitely. When, however, a population grows numerous enough that available forest land must be cultivated more continually, fertility is reduced which consequently reduces yields. Thus, in cases of limited land onto which a population can expand, there is a point within slash-and-burn systems at which deforestation occurs rather than the maintenance of intermittent cultivation and healthy forest regrowth.
“As long as a growing population of slash-and-burn farmers has access to virgin forest reserves, they subjugate them step by step in such a way as to maintain the population density within the limits that permit a reliable regeneration of the biomass and fertility...But as soon as the virgin forest reserves are exhausted, the continuation of population growth is necessarily characterized by an increase in population density, which rapidly leads to deforestation.” (pg 117)
Between the Neolithic agricultural revolution and the post-forest systems of early antiquity, slash-and-burn agriculture spread to most of the cultivable forest environments on the planet and deforested them, undoubtedly the greatest ecological destruction in history. This occurred by way of the “pioneer dynamic” through which populations continually moved onto fresh forest reserves when their original parcels became deforested and no longer productive.
These movements necessarily encountered an insurmountable frontier in the form of an ocean, an uncultivable forest, a tundra, mountains or a territorial limit of another population or state. Once this limit was reached, idle time was decreased in order to feed the population and thus deforestation was accelerated, resulting in reduction in fertility, erosion, and a drier climate due to the elimination of water reserves in the forest canopy.
“By destroying megatons of biomass, as well as reserves of water and hummus on the continental level, deforestation created new ecological conditions of great diversity.” (pg 126) Consequently, humans created new agrarian systems to meet the new conditions of deteriorated fertility, erosion, and desertification. Mazoyer and Roudart spend the rest of the “Systems of Slash and Burn Agriculture” chapter discussing the emergence and differentiation of post-forest agrarian systems. They sketch a map of how populations cultivated their unique ecosystems in environments dramatically different from the one in which neolithic agriculture developed.
In locations where deforestation led to desertification on such a scale that rain-fed agriculture was no longer viable, hydraulic agrarian systems developed. “Thus, in the sixth millenium before the present, the farming and animal breeding peoples of the Sahara, Arabia, and Persia, driven by the dryness that began to predominate in these large areas, moved toward the low alluvial valleys of the Indus, Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile.” (pg 128) The increase in population in these areas necessitated the installation of infrastructure such as dikes, supply canals, outlet canals, basins, locks, dams, wells and culverts in order to manage flood and irrigation waters as well as the social and political organizations to manage them.
In the hot temperate regions of the Mediterranean area, deforestation led to the formation of dry grasslands, steppes and moors and a system was developed that Mazoyer and Roudart give the catchy title of “agrarian systems based on cultivation using an ard, fallowing, and associated animal breeding.” The hilly lands were subjected to intense erosion and were either terraced or reserved for pasture while the low-lying zones were used to cultivate cereal crops. Manure deposited in the pasture was transported to the cultivated lowlands during short periods in which they were fallow. The grassy growth that occurred during fallowing was tilled under with the ard. The deep roots systems of trees made them more hardy during dry periods, making arboriculture common.
“Agrarian systems based on cultivation using an ard, fallowing, and associated animal breeding” also spread to deforested cold temperate regions. There, they were severely limited by the cold, interruption in plant growth and lack of forage in winter.
In the intertropical regions, deforestation led to a landscape dominated by grasses with scattered bushes, shrubs and trees where the clearing of grasses and renewal of fertility was generally accomplished with hoes. In the savannas of Central Africa, which are isolated from the animal herding regions of West and East Africa by a relatively impenetrable ring of forest, this agrarian system is still in practice. There, people use large metal hoes to clear the ground's dense roots after burning the tall grasses during the dry season. Faced with relatively infertile soils, farmers on the Congolese and Zairean plateaus break up the top layer of the soil into small clods which they gather and pile into mounds or ridges, thus concentrating the most fertile soil into a small area scraped from the top layers of a vast area. Such beds are suited to a crop that requires few inputs over time, such as manioc, due to the slow decomposition of the mound's organic matter. In order to grow plants like potato or maize that require more immediate release of minerals, mounds are burned slowly with a covered fire.
More often in intertropical regions, grasslands are used as pasturage and manure is transferred to cultivated lands. One such system exists in the Sudanese and Sahelian regions where cultivated lands are left fallow during the dry season and cultivated during the rainy season. During the lengthy dry season animals are pastured near the village and penned on fallow lands at night to leave their manure. The manure left in the pasture near the villages is transported to cultivated lands during the rainy season. Often times this system is accompanied by arboriculture in which deep rooted trees draw out mineral, produce supplemental biomass and contribute to the renewal of fertility. The most interesting type of tree used for this purpose is the Acacia albida, a legume that fixes nitrogen in the soil
Another such intertropical system that includes cultivation with fallowing and associated animal breeding exists in the Great Lakes region of Rwanda and Burundi where each settlement is surrounded by an enclosure where cattle that pasture in the surrounding savanna during the day are penned at night to deposit a portion of their manure. Crops such as maize, sweet potatoes and bananas are planted just below these enclosures such that animal excrement is transported by way of surface water running down hill during the rainy season, thus fertilizing the cultivated fields without necessitating a fallow period for animals to be penned on them. In these areas perennial forest gardens (which can also be found in other heavily populated tropical regions such as Haiti, Yucatan and Southeast Asia) are also established that can renew their own fertility just as a natural forest does.
In humid tropical regions of India and southern China, where flooding is common, the cultivation of wet rice began more than six thousand years ago and lead to the extensive employment of technologies that dramatically restructured social and political organization. At first wet rice was grown in areas that were naturally submerged for several months per year. Cultivation then expanded to small artificial lake basins, or rice paddies, which were first built on easily drained ground. The water level in such paddies was controlled by draining from higher to lower, and then built as terraces on slopes. On relatively flat and frequently flooded valley lands, it was necessary to guard against destructive floods by erecting high dikes around the riverbed and its branches. In addition to irrigation techniques, technologies such as transplanting, animal traction, and the selection and multiplication of harvests contributed to the development and spread of wet rice growing into areas without excessive rain water such as the Mediterranean.
A handful of slash-and-burn agricultural systems around the world have not been superseded by post-forest agrarian systems. Low productivity in these systems leaves them vulnerable to the ravages of economic competition from stronger agricultural systems. A few potentially advantageous short-term transformations that these systems could undergo include the gradual replacement of soon-to-be destroyed forests with productive plantations and garden-orchards, the development of savanna systems that closely combine cultivated crops with animal breeding, and employing hydro-agriculture and aquaculture in relatively impermeable and wet valleys.
In the following seven chapters, Mazoyer and Roudart go into further detail about about the specific post-forest agrarian systems that they claim principally form humanity's agrarian heritage.
Chapter 4: The Evolution of Hydraulic Agrarian Systems in the Nile Valley
The massive deforestation that followed the pioneer expansion of early slash-and-burn agriculture rendered large expanses of previously fertile land arid and infertile. “Farmers and herders then slowly flowed either toward peripheral regions that remained more humid or toward privileged areas that were well supplied with water from subterranean groundwater or from rivers of distant origin.” (pg 144) Such valley oases included the Tigris, Euphrates, Indus and Nile and required vast hydraulic installation in order to extend cultivated lands, creating the first hydro-agricultural civilizations of antiquity.
Mazoyer and Roudart discuss in depth the example of the Nile valley, to which a massive migration from the quickly drying Egyptian plateaus occurred thousands of years before European civilizations emerged.
During that time, the Nile overflowed its banks each year for several weeks between July and October, moistening the ground and depositing alluvium that fertilized the soil. When the floodwater receded in autumn, seeds were broadcast and crops cultivated through the winter. Harvest took place between March and May. From “spring” until the next flood, the soil dried out and cracked to the point of accomplishing a sort of natural plowing.
At the time of the first villages in the valley only the fringes of the flooded zone were cultivated after the retreat of the water due to the vulnerability of lands closer to the river's banks. From the beginning of the sixth millennium B.C.E., farmers expanded the range of cultivable land by installing earthen dikes in small natural depressions to create rudimentary basins. In the summer, the dikes were pierced to let floodwater into the basin and then sealed to retain the water long enough to saturate the soil, recharge groundwater reserves and deposit silt. In the autumn, the dikes were breached again to release water at the desired time and then resealed in order to protect newly sown crops from any further flooding.
Farmers then broke up the soil at the bottom of the basins with a hoe and softened clods with a mallet. They broadcast seeds and covered them with earth by dragging a bough with many branches or with a scarifying tool called an ard by hand across the field. The sown earth was then packed down by animal herds. Around four thousand years before the present, farmers began to harness the ard to draft animals (oxen, cows, and donkeys). Under special circumstances, additional irrigation was carried out by hauling pitchers of water.
Cerals were harvested with a sickle and flax was simply uprooted. Gleaners followed behind the harvesters with large straw baskets. The crop was threshed either with a long stick or by trampling animals. The grain was then separated from the straw using pitch forks, winnowed and then stored in the village's high cylindrical silos made from beaten earth or mats. After harvest, the basins were turned into common grazing ground for goats and sheep until the next flood.
Beyond the addition of animal manure, farmers overcame a shortage of nitrogen in the basins with a biennial rotation, planting cereals like barley and wheat or flax for textiles one year and then food legumes like lentils, beans and peas and fodder legumes like clover and vetch the next year. The leguminous crops fixed nitrogen in the soil and increased the cereal yields. These rotational systems prefigure the intensive rotations that transformed agriculture in western Europe during the “first agricultural revolution” of the sixteenth to nineteen centuries that is discussed in chapter eight.
Around the middle of the sixth millennium B.C.E., under the supervision of city-states, increasingly complicated series of basins were constructed, terraced outward from the river banks to the edge of the dessert as well as longitudinally, up and downstream. They were protected from large floods by a high dike along the river. Large feeder canals that carried flood waters between basins and onto new lands otherwise untouched by natural flooding were constructed. Gradually, the best organized and most powerful city-states conquered and subjugated the weaker ones, centralizing hydraulic institutions under one kingdom and making possible even more complex systems of water distribution.
Peasants lived in villages on promontories, levees, and dikes that served as dry islands during the floods and they cultivated plots of land granted to them by the government. They were also subjected to heavy tribute in work for the purpose of cultivating estates owned by the state, temple or high dignitaries. Foreign slaves were forced to carry out quarrying, mining and mercenary service. The wealth produced by this labor and of taxes were used to support the hydraulic installations that Nile Valley agriculture relied on and the security reserves necessary in order to deal with irregularities in the flood or harvests, as well as maintenance of public utility and the pharaoh's administration, clergy, soldiers, state workers, and artisans.
The system of cultivation using basins and flood waters was confined within the relatively inelastic limits of floodable space. Thus, the powerful Egyptian civilization required a very carefully managed hydraulic system and adequate stored provisions in the case of a disastrous year. Irrigated cultivation was minimally practiced to mitigate these vulnerabilities. Groundwater could be drawn up from one to three meters with a balancing pole system of Mesopotamian origin called a shadouf or collected from surface water and transported with pitchers. The inability of Egyptian technology to draw from deeper aquifers or to efficiently transport animal manures or rich sediments to irrigated lands that were beyond the reach of silt laden flood waters were primary limiting factors.
With their conquest of Egypt, the Greeks brought the Archimedean screw, a deep reaching barrel moved by a handle, and the saqiya, a vertical water wheel with buckets, to the valley, revolutionizing the region's ability to expand its cultivable lands. Extensive transit systems between the Nile valley and Rome were built, thus transforming Egypt into a major wheat granary for Rome. Over the next century, Asian crops such as rice, sugar cane and indigo and American crops such as tobacco, cotton and Maize were introduced to Egypt, broadening the number of crops the Nile Valley could produce for the succession of empires that occupied it.
Cripplingly high taxes and poor investment in hydraulic institutions drove down the Egyptian population between the Greek conquest and the turn of the nineteenth century. During the first half of the twentieth century, the Ottoman leader Muhammad Ali's attempts to restore the old floodwater distribution canals met little success due to the fact that the basins' intake points were too high for the river's water level at the time, requiring the use of expensive, inefficient elevating machines.
During the second half of the century, diversion dams were constructed on the arms of the delta where floodwater levels were relatively closer to the low-water level of the canals. This process significantly increased irrigable surface area in the region and it became the nearest base to supply Europe with tropical products such as cotton, rice and sugar cane. The pressure to grow even more of these crops ushered in a new hydraulic era of reservoir dams built further up on the river from the delta, extending the range of irrigable lands.
The first Aswan dam, far up toward the beginning of the Nile, was built in 1902 and was heightened in 1912 and again in 1934. By 1950 the irrigated land area reached 2.2 million hectares. Beginning in 1961, government subsidized cooperatives were charged with ensuring the supply of subsidized fertilizer, improved seeds, and pesticides, tractors, implements, crop dusters and threshing machines. Industrial scale agriculture dominated the delta with cotton and food commodities such as rice, wheat, maize, and lentils that were then sold at extremely low prices to the wholesale trade and state industries.
The Aswan high dam, built between 1957 and 1970 several kilometers upstream from the first one is so large that very little water henceforth reaches the sea without being used. The Nile no longer floods but rather serves as the spine of a generalized system of irrigation by canals. The collossal reservoir at Aswan has made year-round irrigation possible some 400,000 hectares of supplementary irrigated lands have been claimed as cropland from the dessert. But the cultivable area gained by the expansion of the new irrigated lands is in great part offset by the losses to the ancient fertile lands of the valley, and above all the delta, due to the growing encroachment of cities, factories, stockpiles, quarries and infrastructure.
Despite widespread double, and sometimes triple, annual cropping and high yields elevated by strong doses of manufactured mineral fertilizers, total agricultural Egyptian exports of cotton, citrus and potatoes are far from offsetting total agricultural imports into the country. The most widespread sequence of crops in a typical year year consists of the ancient winter crops of clover, wheat, barley, broad beans, lentils, or flax followed by a summer crop of fodder and grain maize, sorghum, rice or cotton. Cotton is a demanding crop and generally must alternate with a minimum of one year without cotton that includes a fodder legume. Sometimes a triple annual crop sequence can be found in which varied short cycle crops such as autumn maize, potatoes, beans, tomatoes, squash, eggplants, cucumbers, watermelons, melons, onions, garlic, and lettuce are also planted. Irrigated fodder crops (clover and maize-fodder) represent a quarter of the area harvested.
Most farm work in the Nile Valley is carried out manually and donkey transport is common. Thus, although the yields per hectare of irrigated Egyptian agriculture are today the same size as those of the developed temperate countries, the productivity and earned income remain incomparably much lower.
The old floodwater and basin system persisted in renewing fertility of the Nile Valley's cultivated ecosystem for five thousand years wheras modern day irrigated Egyptian agriculture is quite precarious. At the moment of the now extinct Nile Valley flood extensive leaching occured, helping to prevent salinization of the soils. The floods also fertilized the cropland by depositing alluvium. Today, intense evaporation of irrigated lands in Egypt's hot, dry climate has resulted in fertility compromising salinization of soils. There is excessive concentration of pesticide residue and nitrates in soils, there is massive silt build-up behind the dam rather than in the fertility starved fields and the danger of inadequate water in the Nile persists.
Interestingly, I found myself to be an earnest consumer of the authors' description of the great hydraulic Nile Valley civilization of early antiquity whereas I was a more discerning reader of their account as it moved along in time. The earthen dikes and cereal-legume rotations of eight millenia ago slipped into my brain as historical facts based on some sort of sound archaelogical evidence and it was easy to enumerate them here in an abbreviated form. However, summarizing Mazoyer and Roudart's account of more modern history gave me further pause.
It is not that I doubt the assertions that Egypt is today unindustrialized or that urban employment is scarce in the aftermath of the recent exodus from agricultural livelihoods and population increase. I have in fact traveled to Egypt, although not to the Nile Valley, and even though the scene I witnessed was in line with Mazoyer and Roudart's description of a country hit hard by unemployment and emigration I also saw the all kinds of things beyond the simplified generalizations that historians speak in. It is the infinitely nuanced nature of human experience that presented itself more clearly to me in attempting to recount the authors' modern history than in imagining the ancient picture they painted. The subtleties of how and why people do things the way they do seemed less obvious, less important even, in imagining ancient farmers with neolithic tools than attempting to describe my more recent contemporaries. I wonder if other people feel this way about history.
