PRODUCTIVE FARM CROPS 



CHAPTER I 



CLASSIFICATION, ORIGIN, AND DISTRIBUTION OF 

 FARM CROPS 



Early Culture of Plants. With the earliest recorded history of 

 man, it appears that people at that time lived very largely upon such 

 food plants as they could find growing wild, and whatever wild ani- 

 mals they could kill, even as some very primitive tribes do to-day. 

 Wild animals were probably domesticated before the extensive cul- 

 ture of plants began. These could be herded on the native grasses, 

 the people moving from place to place, as new pasture or water was 

 required. Primitive man had no adequate tools for destroying the 

 forests, preparing stubborn land, or cultivating crops, hence his first 

 culture of crops began where natural difficulties were least. 



These conditions seem to have been provided by the great sandy 

 river beds and deltas in the dry regions, as the valley of the Nile or 

 Euphrates. Here irrigation was practised from the earliest times. 

 The culture of plants favored a settled life, rather than a nomadic 

 life, and with settled and permanent communities, came civilization. 

 A high civilization was first developed in these great river valleys. 



No doubt the first cultivated plants were those the people were 

 accustomed to gather as food in the wild state, as wild barley, wheat, 

 rice, lentils and the grape. These plants have been changed and 

 improved by culture and selection, so the present cultivated forms 

 resemble, only in a general way, the wild prototypes. Specimens of 

 wheat preserved from the Stone Age show the type cultivated then 

 to be much more primitive than that cultivated to-day. 



Number of Cultivated Plants. According to DeCandolle, 1 

 there are among cultivated plants to-day some 46 species, out of 248, 

 that he is reasonably sure were cultivated more than 4,000 years ago, 



1 DeCandolle, A.: Origin of Cultivated Plants (1882), pp. 436-44G. 



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