LESSON

Agriculture
Guiding Question: How has agriculture evolved?

Discuss the beginnings of agriculture.

Explain the importance of industrial agriculture and
the green revolution.
Identify different types of pest control.
Explain the importance of pollinators to agriculture.

Reading Strategy As you read, fill in a main idea and

details chart. List the main ideas of the lesson in the left column. In the right column, note important details about each
main idea.
Vocabulary traditional agriculture, yield, industrial agriculture,
green revolution, biological pest control, integrated pest
management (IPM), pollinator

Can you imagine having to hunt and gather your own food every

day? Can you imagine life without cotton? That was life 15,000 years ago.
Agriculture arose only about 10,000 years ago. Many aspects of human
civilization began about the same time. That is probably not a coincidence. Walking around all day hunting and gathering didnt leave much
time for creating art or new technology!

Development of Agriculture
Agriculture began about 10,000 years ago, when a warmer
climate enabled humans to plant seeds and raise livestock.
Everything you eat and all the natural fabrics you wear are products of
agriculture. If you dont run a farm, you rely on people who do. But agriculture is a relatively new development in human history.
During most of the human species 200,000-year existence, we have
been hunter-gatherers, depending on wild plants and animals for our
food and fiber. Then about 10,000 years ago, the climate warmed following an ice age. In the warmer climate, plants grew better. People in the
Middle East, China, and other areas began to grow plants from seed and
to raise animals.
Agriculture probably began when hunter-gatherers
brought wild fruits, grains, and nuts back to their camps.
Some of these foods fell to the ground, were thrown
away, or were eaten but had seeds that passed through
someones digestive system. The plants that grew from
these seeds likely produced fruits larger and tastier than
most, because they came from seeds of fruits that people
had selected. As these plants bred with others nearby
that shared those characteristics, they produced new
generations of plants with large and tasty fruits. You can
see more details of the evolution of agriculture in Figure
13 on the next page.

12.3 LESSON PLAN PREVIEW

Inquiry Students investigate
agricultural advances throughout history.
Real World Students find examples of chemical pesticide use
in their environment.
Differentiated Instruction
English language learners study
word parts to understand the
terms pollination and pollinators.

12.3 RESOURCES
In Your Neighborhood Activity, Local
Planting Conditions Map It Online
Lesson 12.3 Worksheets Lesson 12.3
Assessment Chapter 12 Overview
Presentation
Figure 12 Early Farming Tools
The blades in this photo were used to
harvest crops about 5000 years ago.

Soil and Agriculture 365

Eastern
United
States

wheat

Fertile
Crescent

rice

China

Sahel
sunflower

New Guinea

sorghum

Mesoamerica

West
Africa
corn squash

Andes

Amazonia

potato

Ethiopia
coffee

bananas

Origins of agriculture
Independent origin
Possible independent origin

Data from syntheses in Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, germs, and steel. New York: W.W. Norton; and Goudie, A. 2000. The human impact, 5th ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Figure 13 Beginnings of Agriculture Agriculture

originated independently in multiple locations as different
cultures selectively bred plants and animals from wild
species. Areas where people are thought to have invented

Map it

Origins of Agriculture
The earliest widely accepted
evidence of agriculture is from
the Fertile Crescent region of the
Middle East. Refer to Figure 13
as you answer the questions that
follow.
1. Interpret Maps According to
the map, in what four areas did
agriculture most likely arise
independently?
2. Interpret Maps In which part
of the world were coffee crops
first planted?
3. Infer Two large rivers, the
Tigris and Euphrates, run
through the Fertile Crescent.
How did those rivers help make
it a good place for agriculture?
366 Lesson 3

agriculture independently are colored green. In areas colored

blue, it is not known whether people invented agriculture
independently or adopted it from other cultures. The map also
shows a few of the crops farmed in each region.

Selective Breeding and Settlement Eventually, people realized

they could control what they grew. Our ancestors then began planting
seeds only from those plants whose fruit they liked the most. These were
the beginnings of artificial selection, or selective breeding. Selective breeding has resulted in all the food crops and livestock that feed you every day.
Once our ancestors learned to cultivate crops, they began to build
more permanent settlements, often near water sources. The need to
harvest their crops kept them settled, and once they were settled, it made
sense to plant more crops. They also began to raise animals as livestock.
Increased populations resulted from settlement and more-reliable food
supply and reinforced the need for both. Eventually, the ability to grow
excess food enabled some people to live away from the farm, leading to
the development of professional specialties, commerce, technology, cities,
social classes, and political organization. Agriculture ultimately brought
us the civilization we know today.

Traditional Agriculture Until the Industrial Revolution of the

1800s, the work of cultivating, harvesting, storing, and distributing crops
everywhere was performed by human and animal muscle power, along
with hand tools and non-motorized machines such as plows. This biologically powered agriculture is known as traditional agriculture. Traditional
agriculture may use teams of worker animals and use irrigation and
organic fertilizer, but it does not require fossil fuels.

Industrial Agriculture
Industrial agriculture and the green revolution have saved millions of people from starvation.
The Industrial Revolution introduced large-scale mechanization and
fossil-fuel engines to agriculture just as it did to industry. Farmers could
replace their horses and oxen with faster, more powerful, and more efficient means of harvesting, processing, and transporting crops.
In addition to the efficient farm machinery that resulted from the
Industrial Revolution, other changes to agriculture came in the mid1900s. Many of these were reactions to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s
and/or based on wartime technology. There were irrigation improvements
and the introduction of synthetic fertilizers. There was also the introduction of chemical pesticides, which reduced competition from weeds and
the loss of crops to pests. Because the soil was more productive, and fewer
crops were lost to pests, yield increased. Yield is the amount of a crop
produced in a given area.

The Rise of Industrial Agriculture Mechanized farming technol-

ogy, the fossil fuels it runs on, manufactured chemicals, and irrigation
all allow for industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture produces huge
amounts of crops and livestock. It is also known as high-input agriculture
because it relies on people to put in enormous quantities of energy,
water, and chemicals. Today, industrial agriculture is practiced on more
than 25 percent of the worlds croplands and on most of the croplands in
the United States.
Because it uses large machinery and chemicals that are customized
for a specific crop, to be most efficient, industrial agriculture requires that
large areas be planted with a single crop, in a monoculture. You can see a
monoculture in Figure 14. The planting of crops in monocultures makes
planting and harvesting more efficient and can thereby increase harvests.
However, monocultures have drawbacks as well. Large monocultures
reduce biodiversity over large areas, because far fewer wild organisms
are able to live in monocultures than in their native habitats or in morediverse plantings. Moreover, because all the plants in a monoculture are
genetically similar, they are vulnerable to the same diseases and pests. For
this reason, monocultures carry the risk of catastrophic crop failure.
Reading
Checkpoint

 escribe one advantage and one disadvantage of a

D
monoculture.

ANSWERS

Map It
1. Mesoamerica, the Andes, the Fertile Crescent, China
2. Ethiopia
3. They supply water.
Reading Checkpoint Sample
answer: Advantage: efficiency;
disadvantage: possible catastrophic
crop failure because all the plants are
vulnerable to the same diseases and
pests

Figure 14 Monoculture Most crop

production in developed nations comes
from monocultures such as this cornfield
in Texas. Planting crops in large, uniform
fields greatly improves the efficiency of
planting and harvesting. Unfortunately,
it also decreases biodiversity and makes
crops susceptible to pests that have
adapted to feed on that crop.

The Green Revolution In the mid- to late 1900s, the desire

for more and better food for the worlds growing population led
to the green revolution, in which agricultural scientists from
developed nations introduced new technology, crop varieties,
and farming practices to the developing world. (Green in this
context implies covered with plants rather than environmentally friendly.)

The technology sharing began in the 1940s,

when U.S. scientist Norman Borlaug introduced Mexicos farmers
to a specially bred strain of wheat (Figure 15). It produced large
seed heads, was short enough to avoid wind damage, resisted
diseases, and produced high yields. Within two decades Mexico
had tripled its wheat productionin fact, it had surplus wheat
it could export. Soon many developing nations were increasing their crop yields using selectively bred strains of wheat, rice,
corn, and other crops from developed nations.
Along with new strains of crops, developing nations also
imported new methods of industrial agriculture from developed
nations. Developing nations began applying large amounts of
synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides on their fields, liberally irrigating crops, and using heavy equipment powered by fossil fuels. Intensive agriculture of this sort saved millions in India
and Pakistan from starvation in the 1970s and eventually turned
these nations into net exporters of grain.

Technology

Figure 15 The Green Revolution

Norman Borlaug, the Father of the
Green Revolution, holds the wheat
variety he bred that launched the
green revolution. The high-yielding,
disease-resistant wheat saved many
people in developing nations from
starvation.
BIG QUESTION
How can we balance our growing
demand for food with our need to
protect the environment?
Perspective Have students work
in pairs. Have each pair write one
paragraph that evaluates how the
green revolution affected our ability
to meet the growing need for food.
Then, have students write a second
paragraph that evaluates how the
green revolution affected humanitys impact on land and soil. Have
students share their completed
paragraphs with the class.
ANSWERS

Reading Checkpoint Sample

answer: The green revolution
introduced new technologies, crop
varieties, and farming practices to
developing nations.

368 Lesson 3

The green revolution has saved

millions of lives. Its technology comes at a high energy cost,
however. Between 1900 and 2008, the energy used by agriculture increased by 7000 percent! On the positive side, the higher
productivity of already-cultivated land preserved some ecosystems, because less additional land needed to be cleared for crops.
Between 1961 and 2008, food production rose 150 percent and
population rose 100 percent, while area converted for agriculture
increased only 10 percent. So the green revolution has prevented
some deforestation and habitat loss and preserved the biodiversity of some ecosystems.
On the negative side, the intensive application of water, inorganic fertilizers, and pesticides has worsened erosion, salinization, desertification, eutrophication, and pollution. In addition,
the use of fossil fuels to produce fertilizer and pesticides and to
run farm equipment has increased air pollution and contributed
to global warming. So the green revolution has saved human
lives, but there have been environmental costs. The need to
maintain this life-saving productivity while limiting environmental damage has led to attempts at more-sustainable agriculture. You will read more about these in the next lesson.

Environmental Effects

Reading
Checkpoint

Describe the green revolution in your own words.

Pests
Chemical pesticides, biological pest control, and integrated
pest management can all effectively protect crops from pests.
What are pests? What are weeds? We call an organism a pest when it damages plants that are valuable to us, such as crops. We call a plant a weed
when it competes with our plants. As you see, these are subjective terms
based on our economic interests. Since the beginnings of agriculture, the
pests that eat our crops and the weeds that compete with them have taken
advantage of the ways we cluster plants in agricultural fields. In a monoculture, a population of a pest adapted to that plant can chew through
entire fields. From the viewpoint of a pest adapted to feed on corn, for
example, a cornfield is an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Chemical Pesticides To prevent crop losses from pests and weeds,

people have developed thousands of chemical pesticides. Roughly

400 million kilograms (900 million pounds) of active ingredients from
conventional pesticides are applied in the United States each year. Three
quarters of this amount is applied on agricultural land. Since 1960, pesticide use has risen fourfold worldwide. Usage in developed nations has
leveled off in the past two decades, but it continues to rise in the developing world.
The ability of a pesticide to reduce a pest population often declines
over time as the population evolves resistance to it. Recall that natural
selection occurs within populations when individuals vary in their traits.
Because the populations of insects and microorganisms in farm fields are
huge, it is likely that some individuals have genes that give them immunity
to a given pesticide. So even if a pesticide application kills 99.99 percent
of the insects in a field, 1 in 10,000 survives. If an insect survives because
it is genetically resistant to a pesticide and it passes the resistance trait to
its offspring, the trait will become more common in the population. As a
larger and larger proportion of the insects in the population become resistant to the pesticide, the chemical becomes less and less effective on that
population. As a result, industrial chemists are caught up in an evolutionary arms race with the pests they battle, racing to
increase the toxicity of pesticides while the pests
continue to develop resistance.

Figure 16 Biological Pest Control

Tomato hornworms are large cater
pillars that can destroy a tomato crop
very quickly. Here you can see the small
white eggs of a parasitoid wasp on a
hornworm. When the eggs hatch, the
larvae will feed on the caterpillar till it
diespossibly saving a tomato plant!

Biological Pest Control Because of pesticide

resistance and health risks from some pesticides,

agricultural scientists increasingly battle pests
and weeds with organisms that eat or infect them.
This strategy is called biological pest control. For
example, parasitoid wasps are natural enemies
of many caterpillars. These wasps lay eggs on a
caterpillar. The larvae that hatch from the eggs feed
on the caterpillar, eventually killing it (Figure 16).
Some successful biological pest control efforts have
led to steep reductions in pesticide use.
Soil and Agriculture 369

Find Out
More
Contact your local division of the
USDA and ask if an introduced
predator or parasite has ever been
used to control a pest in your area. If
so, what was the result? If not, ask if
they would ever consider doing so.

ANSWERS

Find Out More Answers will vary.

Students responses should indicate
that they have contacted the local
division of the USDA to learn about
introduced predators or parasites.
Reading Checkpoint No one
knows what effects the predator
or parasite will have on nontarget
organisms because they have never
lived in the same ecosystem before.

Bt

A widespread modern biological pest control effort is the use of

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Bt is a naturally occurring soil bacterium that
produces a protein that kills many caterpillars and the larvae of some flies
and beetles. Farmers have used the natural pesticidal activity of this bacterium to their advantage by spraying spores of it on their crops. When
used correctly, Bt can protect crops from pest-related losses.
In some cases, biological pest
control requires the introduction of an organism from a different ecosystem. Unfortunately, this means that no one can know for certain in
advance what effects the biological pest control organism might have. In
some cases, biological pest control organisms have become invasive and
harmed nontarget organismsorganisms other than the pests.

Introduced Predators and Parasites

If biological pest control works as planned, it can

be a permanent solution that requires no maintenance and is environmentally harmless. However, like all invasive species, invasive biological
pest control organisms can have wide-ranging ecological and economic
impacts, as did the cactus moth in Figure 17. And if nontarget organisms
are harmed, the damage may be permanent because halting biological
pest control is far more difficult than stopping the application of a pesticide. Because of such concerns, researchers study biological pest control
proposals carefully before putting them into action, and government
regulators must approve those proposals. But there is never a surefire way
of knowing in advance whether a biological pest control program will
work as planned.

Benefits and Costs

Reading
Checkpoint

Figure 17 Risks of Biological Pest

Control Cactus moth larvae eat the
pads of prickly pear cactus. The story
of the cactus moth is one of both
great success and environmental
destruction. The cactus moth was
imported from Argentina to Australia in
the 1920s to control prickly pear cactus
that was invading rangeland. Within
just a few years, millions of hectares
of rangeland were free of the cactus.
Following the cactus moths success
in Australia, it was introduced in other
nations. Unfortunately, cactus moths
introduced to Caribbean islands spread
to Florida and ate many rare native
cacti there. If these moths spread to
Mexico and the southwestern United
States, they could destroy the many
native and economically important
species of prickly pear there. Biologist
Colothdian Tate (inset) has worked to
prevent this ecological disaster.
370 Lesson 3

 hat is one risk of introducing a predator or parasite from a

W
different ecosystem?

Integrated Pest Management Because both chemical and biological pest control approaches have their drawbacks, agricultural scientists
and farmers have developed more-complex strategies that combine the
most-useful aspects of each. In integrated pest management (IPM), different techniques are combined to achieve the most effective long-term
pest reduction. IPM may include biological pest control, close monitoring of populations, habitat alteration, crop rotation, reduced soil tillage,
mechanical pest removal, and chemical pesticides.
In recent decades, IPM has become popular in many parts of the
world. Indonesia is an important example. Indonesias government had
financially supported chemical pesticide use for years, but its scientists
came to understand that the pesticides were actually making the pest
problems worse. Pesticides were killing the natural predators of the
brown plant-hopper, an insect that devastated rice fields as its population
exploded. Concluding that supporting pesticide use was costing money,
causing pollution, and decreasing yields, in 1986, the Indonesian government acted. It banned imports of 57 pesticides, slashed financial support
for pesticide use, and encouraged IPM. Within four years, Indonesias
pesticide production fell to less than half its 1986 level, pesticide imports
fell to one third, and financial support for them was phased out, saving
$179 million annually. After these actions, rice yields rose 13 percent.

Pollinators
Insects and other animals are essential to the reproduction of
many crops.
Pests are such a major problem in agriculture that it is easy to fall into a
habit of thinking of all insects as destructive. But in fact, most insects are
harmless to agriculture, and some are essential.

Pollination Pollination is the process by which male sex cells

of a plant (pollen) fertilize female sex cells of a plant. Without
pollination, plants cannot reproduce sexually. Plants such as
conifer trees and grasses are pollinated by pollen grains carried on the wind. These plants are fertilized when, by chance,
pollen grains land on the female parts of other plants of their
species. Plants with showy flowers, however, are typically
pollinated by animals, such as insects, hummingbirds, and
bats. These animals are called pollinators. Pollinators are
among the most vital, yet least appreciated, factors in agriculture. When pollinators feed on flower nectar, they collect
pollen on their bodies and take it to the next flower, which
might then be fertilized.
Our important grain crops, such as corn and wheat,
are wind-pollinated, but many other crops, such as fruits,
depend on insects for pollination (Figure 18). The most
complete survey to date lists 800 species of cultivated plants
that rely on bees and other insects for pollination.

Figure 18 Pollinators Many

agricultural crops depend on
insects to pollinate them. Our food
supply, therefore, depends partly on
conservation of these vital animals.
Flowers such as these apple blossoms
have shapes and sweet scents that
advertise nectar to pollinators such as
honeybees.

Soil and Agriculture 371

Declining Pollinators Unfortunately,

Figure 19 Pollinator-Safe Gardening

Japanese beetles can destroy rosebushes
very quickly. The canister (inset) contains a
pheromone (chemical signal) that attracts
only Japanese beetles, destroying them and
conserving pollinators while protecting
rosebushes.

ANSWERS

Lesson 3 Assessment For answers

to the Lesson 3 Assessment, see page
A18 at the back of the book.

pollinator populations have declined. One

example is the alkali bee, a native pollinator of Utah, Nevada, and other dry areas
of western North America. Alkali bees
are a major pollinator of alfalfa, which is
a very important livestock feed and cover
crop. When pesticide use rose in the mid1900s, alkali bee populations plummeted,
and alfalfa yields fell, threatening both
crop and livestock agriculture. Farmers
have changed the way they use pesticides
in alkali bee habitat, but alkali bees are
now extinct in many of their former
breeding areas.
Preserving the biodiversity of native
pollinators is especially important
because our most common domesticated
pollinator, the honeybee, is declining
sharply. North American farmers regularly hire beekeepers to bring colonies of this introduced bee to
their fields when it is time to pollinate crops. Honeybees pollinate
more than 100 crops, which together make up one third of the U.S.
diet. In recent years, two accidentally introduced parasites have
swept through honeybee populations, destroying hives. In addition, starting in 2006, entire hives began dying off for an unknown
reason. Scientists are racing to discover the reasons for this mysterious syndrome, which is called colony collapse disorder, before it
threatens our food supply.

Pollinator Conservation Farmers and homeowners can help

maintain populations of insect pollinators, such as bees, by reducing or eliminating pesticide use. Otherwise, they risk killing the
good bugs along with the bad bugs. Pest control measures that
target specific pests, such as the pheromone trap in Figure 19, are
pollinator-safe alternatives to pesticides.

3
1. Communicate Write a paragraph describing
when and how agriculture likely began. End with a
description of the beginnings of selective breeding.
2. Infer How have industrial agriculture and the
green revolution affected the worlds population?
3. Compare and Contrast How do (a) chemical
pesticides, (b) biological control, and (c) integrated
pest management protect crops from pests?
372 Lesson 3

4. Review How are pollinators important to crop

agriculture?
Suppose that you were
5.
the resource manager for a national wildlife refuge
with a pest problem. You have been told that you
can import predators of the pest from Asia to begin
a biological pest control program. What three
questions would you ask before you began that
program?