THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURE Sowing seed for crops was the very beginning of the development of agriculture.

Agricultural methods have to be devised to aid the propagation of the growing plant. New varieties of plants had to be developed which would germinate readily when shown and which produce sufficient amounts of food and other useful products under the growing conditions of the environment. There was an urgency to this, for when man began to cultivate plants, he was also able to settle down, and as this food supplies increased, his numbers increased too and he became more dependent on what he could take from the soil. The most primitive method of agriculture was doubtless to drop seeds in small clearings, giving the seedling a chance to grow before the natural vegetation closed in again. This type of agriculture was use by the natives of Sumatra and Borneo in relatively modern times when they started their rubber tree plantings the next stage was the preparation of a larger cleared area, a little field tilled by hoeing or otherwise turning over the soil. In Peru this is still done with a wooden planting peg. Then came protection of the seedling plants against the encroachment of native vegetation-weeding the fields. Next, perhaps, followed the sowing of several different plants together which might help each other, as, for instance, corn plants whose stalk would serve as supports from beans. A still further step was the use of the plough and ultimately the harnessing of animals to pull it, making possible the cultivation of increasingly larger areas. Irrigation was another innovation already achieved in prehistoric times. Present day Indians still sow corn in rivers beds immediately after spring flood have drenched the soil, indicating how the idea of irrigation may have originated. The Nabataeans, pre-Christian traders and agriculturists of Palestine, carried it further, building simple dams to break the force of flash floods and spread their water over valley floors, a system which pointed the way to the modern methods of bringing extra water to the soil before planting. And now, as man settled, cities grew and brought with them entirely new agricultural problem-exhaustion of the soil. In such favored lands as Egypt, yearly floods brought ever-new supplies of nutrients to replenish those used up by intensive cultivation, but elsewhere, as in the Tigris and Euphrates valley, excessive irrigation let to silting of the land and salting of irrigation water-the same thing that happening today in California and in the Rio Grande valley on the border between Texas and Mexico great civilization fell when the soil get out. And even in areas with a plentiful water supply, manuring became essential but is was still not enough to support the natural growth of population, and so nation began to reach out across their borders and even across the seas to obtain the food and other plant staples which they required. With mass cultivation, new problems of erosion, weed, pest and disease control, soil conservation and maintenance of fertility have arisen. Erosion is one of the most serious, occurring wherever unprotected soil lies open to strong winds or excessive rainfall. Since about 40 percent of our cultivated plants, covering more than 80 percent of our crops-lands, are annuals which have to be resown each year on bare soil, the problem of protecting these fields in autumn, winter and spring has assumed major importance.

The loss top soil is only one of erosions harmful effects; it also causes leaching of nutrients from the soil, particularly serious in tropical countries with high rainfall. This forces the agricultural population to clear new areas regularly for they primitive cultivation, abandoning the leached soil of their fields to further erosion and destroying more and more forest.