Plants And Man

In my never ending quest for new and interesting topics to write about, I've decided to take a slightly broader approach to this weeks column and discuss an event that has shaped the history of mankind--the origin of agri-culture. This was triggered as I drove towards Calgary recently and noticed that a few of the fields had already been plowed. In Alberta, agriculture is the provinces second largest industry behind oil and gas (tourism is hot on its heels), however its true importance is often forgotten as we go about our everyday lives.

The development of agriculture was, without a doubt, the single most important event in human history. For the first time, man's population was not controlled by the cyclical availability of food and game. The hunter-gatherer type of existence began to make way for a more sedentary life style. For the first time, nomadic bands of people could develop small communities where food could be produced in order to feed the growing populations. Did I say growing populations? Immediately after farming was developed, the human population began to grow exponentially as it became possible to produce enough food to feed increasingly large numbers of people.

Agriculture seems to have appeared around 12,000 years ago in the fer-tile area then known as Mesopotamia, now Iraq. And appropriately enough, one of the first plants cultivated was wheat. Easily cultivated, grasses like wheat, grew very well when provided with some tillage and irrigation. Other grasses, like barley, may have been domesticated as a result of their being a weed impossible to eliminate from the wheat. Other crops developed around the same time included lentils, millets, field pea, chickpea, flax, olives, dates, apples, pears, cherries and figs. It's difficult to imagine that around the same time the glacial ice was slowly moving out of the Bow Valley, that in other parts of the world, such events were taking place.

Closer to home, around 9,200 years ago the area around present day Mexico City saw the advent of new world agriculture. The main crop was maize or corn but other plants like squash, chilies, avocado and grains were also grown. By 3,000 years ago, the people of this area had changed enough to be considered primarily as farmers. No longer was there the need to hunt for natural foods when most could be grown with little difficulty.

The trend still continues today. Farmers are still the providers of food and most of us the consumers. Today also brings us to another juncture in the history of farming. The new environmental awareness, coupled with lessons learned over the 55 years since the dustbowls, will hopefully bring some drastic changes to the way the world farms in the next 50 years. Soil conservation and the reduced use of pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals will begin to reduce the plethora of chemicals we ingest every day. A typical salad may contain half a dozen or more different chemical residues as each component of that salad may have been sprayed with a specific chemical. As more and more organic farms appear and people begin to pressure governments and farmers to reduce the use of chemicals, this problem will begin to shrink.

The next time you drive towards Calgary and notice a farmer out working his fields, take a few seconds as you truly are watching one of the worlds oldest professions.