Category: History

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8000 years of agricultural history in two papers

A paper just out in Quaternary Science Reviews provides an overview of the first 3000 years of the spread of cultivated cereals around Eurasia, based on archaeobotanical evidence. The paper has some nice maps, but the press release has a really cool animated gif, which I had no hesitation in stealing.

via GIPHY

Here’s a quick summary:

  • Before 5000 BCE: farming communities used foothill, alluvial and catchment locations in different parts of Eurasia.
  • Between 5000-2500 BCE: crops move around, but remain ecologically constrained, with the Tibetan Plateau and the Asian monsoons separating east from west, and north from south.
  • Between 2500-1500 BCE: crops are taken to new thermal and hydrologic contexts, bringing previously isolated agricultural systems together.

And where are we now? Well, for that you need another new paper, this one in PLOS ONE: Regional and global shifts in crop diversity through the Anthropocene. As luck would have it, three phases here too, covering the past 50 years:

  • little change in crop diversity from 1961 through to the late 1970s
  • a 10-year period of sharp diversification through the early 1980s
  • “levelling-off” of crop diversification beginning in the early 1990s

No gif, alas, but there’s a little video accompanying the press release in which the author summarizes the results.

The title of that press release says it all really: “A small number of crops are dominating globally. And that’s bad news for sustainable agriculture.” Compare and contrast with the findings of Colin Khoury and friends from a couple of years back on the increasing homogeneity of global diets. Basically looking at the same data in a somewhat different way: pretty much the same result.

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Agriculture in watercolour

Before the invention of the camera, people used watercolours to document the world. Over the centuries, painters – both professional and amateur – created hundreds of thousands of images recording life as they witnessed it. Every one of these paintings has a story to tell, but many are hidden away in archives, albums and store rooms, too fragile to display. The Watercolour World exists to bring them back into view.

And pretty fantastic it is too. Search for agriculture and see for yourself.

The Plough. Print after Valentine Green (1801). The British Museum.
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Brainfood: Sinotato, Photophenomics, Bangladesh lentils, Vernalization gene, Droning on, Pathogen identification, Human domestication, Citrus cryo, Purple rain, Teff diversity, Mining biodiversity lit, Wild dates, Buckwheat improvement, Panicum genome

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High on the hog

While this study has focused on the internal dynamics, it is important to note that China’s contemporary pork industry relies on – and is altering – global resources and markets. With 21 per cent of the world’s population but only 9 per cent of arable land, feeding China’s pigs without starving China’s people has required re-routing international trade, investment and resource flows. In 2014, China imported almost 60 per cent of the total global soybean trade (70 million tonnes) for its livestock feed industry; maize imports are also rising, and the party-state increasingly supports Chinese agribusiness firms to ‘go out’ (zou chuqu) to seek access to land, resources and markets abroad. In terms of ramping up pork production while avoiding widespread hunger, the development model has been successful: although food security remains a focus for the state (and a problem especially for poor rural populations), for those who can afford it, modern life means living high on the hog.

How can you possibly resist a piece that ends like that? It’s from Reforming the Humble Pig: Pigs, Pork and Contemporary China by Mindi Schneider, the final chapter in Animals through Chinese History: Earliest Times to 1911. The whole thing is open access, courtesy of Cambridge University Press.