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 in between. 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 four 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, spinach, lettuce, cabbage, 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.
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, to make them into a kind of wedge.
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.
Finally, the fourth thing you have to do is to store the grain safely until you want to eat it. This turned out to be very hard, and people tried a lot of different ways before they found a good way to store grain. They finally stored the grain in clay pots - this may be what made people invent pottery.
But who did the farming? How was it organized? Click here for more on that.
Plows
Native American farming
Egyptian farming
African farming
Main Economy page
Tell a friend about this page
Did Kidipede answer your question?
Yes, thanks! / No, can you help me?
