What developments occured in agriculture?

Question

what all changes and advancements have occured in agriculture?Is there any site where we can find details.

For instance,tractors have replaced ploughe(oxen,horses)

Some more changes like this

Answer 1

How about the age of GPS technology?  I am a farmer and have invested greatly in the Global Positioning System.  goto www.outbackguidance.com to see the technology.  I use it in a 75ft boom sprayer to guide me on parallel passes with less than 6 inches of overlap.  This allows me  to apply expensive chemicals and fertilizers to fields accurately.  A complete system with the newest technology has the ability for auto-steering, auto boom (automatically shuts off booms in applied areas) auto boom height (keep booms lvl with contours of fields) and record keeping all in one system.  Which essentially reduces operator fatigue, allowing more acres to be completed, in an effiecient and extremely accurate way.  They talk about the agricultural revolution in history but the Neo-Technology Age of Agriculture is truely a revolutionary achievement.

Answer 2

There are probably entire libraries on this question.  Go to wikipedia.org and type in "history of farming."

Answer 3

When nomadic people stopped roaming and settled in one place, they had to find a source of food. Early developments include domestication of animals for food and work (dogs from wolves, mules from horses and donkeys) and the cultivation of land. Tools also came out, such as the plow, the hoe, the fork and the shovel. The use of steel in worktools came later, when John Deere used a steel saw blade to make a plow blade, one of the first metal blade. Society also advanced, from using stone, to bronze, to iron. (stone age to bronze age to iron age). The list goes on and on. Also, there is evidence to support the theory the Amazon rainforest was created by cultivating early groups.

Answer 4

The history of agriculture, from when primitive people found that spilled grain on the ground came back as the plant that gave the grain, to this very day when our corn growers are using their product to fuel engines (and lament low rainfall/ low profit) is a huge and interesting subject that is the basis for our whole civilization. Some highlights...

Hydroponic food/ plant production, one of the topics that I found and fell in love with in college, stepped out of the lab as a tool to control and manage research in plant studies, and now accounts for a huge amount of the food consumed, especially where land is at a premium or the weather/ land is not conducive to production of a plant. The major complaint is that the food produced is too chemical in nature and the flavor (because of the process) is lacking. I did some research and developed a way to use hydroponics in a 100% organic form and the quality and quantity was beyond my expectations. I did a number of plants in a small facility and one of the prizes was an organic hydroponic strawberry the flavor of which was the single most incredible memorable moment in my life. There is ongoing research in organic hydroponics (MIT came down to look at my project some years back, and I kind of suspect they didn't believe it could be done, organic hydroponics with organic aquaculture (fish) in tandem; I never gave up the details as to how I do it).

The real developement is how agriculture has gone full circle and we now see the best way to produce is organic and sustainable; we mimic Mother Nature. We don't need to plow, we use heavy layers of mulches to control weeds, control moisture, provide a good environment for the soil organisms, and this in turn, "grows" a good soil and soil environment, and feeds the plants cleanly, and leaves the soil better than it was. We don't destroy the elegant and fragile soil environment with chemicals, we nurture it with the organics that the whole ecology has spent millions of years adapting to. Now we take stock of all our past mistakes and use that knowlege to better what Mother Nature has been telling us all along, since the first spilled grain that was thought to be wasted, sprouted and grew a plant and the first gardens came about. Full circle.

Answer 5

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultura...

Overview

This source gives an excellent summary of improvements in the 20th century.