Farming history
for kids - when and where did people start farming? why did they want to farm?
what did people grow?
Ancient and Medieval Farming
A field of wheat
People did not farm at all until around 10,000 BC,
or about 12,000 years ago. About that time, there was a climate
change that made it hotter and drier. People had to crowd into the
places where there was still enough water. They probably began farming
because the area where they lived got too crowded. There got to be so
many people there that they couldn't all get enough food just by hunting
and gathering and fishing.
Wild plants that you can eat don't grow close enough together. There
are too many inedible plants inbetween. If you plant your own seeds,
you can make there be more wheat
and fewer weeds, so there is enough food
for more people (though there tends to be less variety in the food,
and so the food these people have to eat is boring and less healthy
than what hunter-gatherers eat, and it
is a lot more work than gathering).
Irrigating a cotton field in China, c. 1750 AD
from Columbia University
There are three main things you have to do in order to farm. First,
you have to get the seeds in the ground. In most parts of Europe, northern
Africa, and Western Asia, people
plant their seeds in the fall, around October.
Sowing Seeds
You can do it seed by seed, digging little holes, but usually people
used a plow. Mostly men did the plowing, because
you have to have very strong arms, and women often walked behind the
men, planting the seeds. The main kinds of plants that people planted
were grains: wheat, barley, millet,
oats and rye, and legumes like peas, lentils, and chickpeas. People
also planted trees, especially fruit trees and olive
trees, and grapevines. Most people
also had a small vegetable garden, for onions, cucumbers, garlic, string
beans, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, carrots, and herbs like rosemary,
oregano, thyme and mint.
(Click here for more about cooking and
food).
Second, you have to weed the fields: you have to kill as many of the
weeds as possible, so the plants you want will have room to grow. Usually
women did most of the weeding, using a hoe. Sometimes you have to water
them as well. Mostly this was done with irrigation
canals and ditches. In people's vegetable gardens, people often
carried their water by hand from a stream or a well.
And third, you have to harvest the fields. In most of the Mediterranean
people harvest grain around June. You have to cut down or pull up the
plants. It is usually men who cut (reap) the grain, with sickles. Women
rake and stack the grain. In the Stone
Age, sickles were made of wood or bone, with little stone teeth
set into them.
In the Bronze Age, some
fancy sickles were made of bronze,
but still most people used stone sickles. After about 1000 BC,
iron sickles began to be used
in a lot of places, but you still find some people using the cheaper home-made
stone sickles for another thousand years or more. Legumes are usually
pulled up whole, plants and all, and dried that way. But vegetables have
to be picked by hand.
After the grain was reaped, it had to be threshed. You have to somehow
separate the wheat (the part you eat) from the chaff (the part you can't
eat). Usually people spread all their wheat out on a clean hard surface
(the threshing floor) on a windy day and used wooden pitchforks to throw
it up into the air, so that the wind would blow away the lighter chaff
and the heavier grain would fall back down to the threshing floor. You
had to do it over and over until the grain was all threshed.
But who did the farming? How was it organized? Click
here for more on that.
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