Tiny farms grow a third of the world's food on a sliver of land
Five of every six farms on Earth cover less than two hectares, yet together they occupy only about 12 percent of farmland. Meanwhile the biggest one percent of farms control more than 70 percent of it. Somewhere between those extremes, humanity grows roughly 11 billion tonnes of food a year, and loses about 14 percent before it reaches the shops.
People were eating wild grains at least 105,000 years ago, but deliberate planting began only around 11,500 years ago. Near the Sea of Galilee, traces of emmer, barley and oat cultivation go back 23,000 years. Farming arose independently in at least 11 regions. Mesopotamians had tamed sheep somewhere from 13,000 to 11,000 years back, and cattle were bred from wild aurochs in what are now Turkey and Pakistan around 10,500 years ago. Humans were not first, though: some ants, termites and beetles have tended crops for up to 60 million years.
The payoff was surplus food, which let populations swell far beyond what hunting could support and made settled towns and cities possible. Sumerians lived in villages by around 8000 BC, watering fields from the Tigris and Euphrates through canals; ploughs appear in their pictures by about 3000 BC. Egypt depended on the Nile's annual floods. China built a nationwide granary system from the 5th century BC and later heavy iron ploughs with mouldboards that spread west across Eurasia. Asian rice traces back to a single domestication along the Pearl River.
The word comes from Latin ager, a field, and cultura, growing. Today farming yields not only food but fibres, fuels and raw materials such as rubber and timber, including about 32 million tonnes of natural fibre and 4 billion cubic metres of wood each year.
Industrial monocultures came to dominate output in the 20th century. Plant breeding, fertilisers and pesticides sharply raised yields, and modern animal husbandry boosted meat output, but at a price: aquifer depletion, deforestation, antibiotic resistance, pollution and a share of climate change, along with animal welfare concerns. Farming also suffers from the damage it helps cause, since eroded soils, desertification and lost biodiversity all cut harvests.
Source: Agriculture
