History and Changes in Agriculture
It is very important to know the history of agriculture in Central Europe and its various developments from its beginnings at the end of the Stone Age to the present day if we want to understand its influencing factors and its impact on the landscape, biodiversity and people.
The Neolithic revolution at the end of the Stone Age marked the beginning of sedentarization and thus the agricultural activity of humans as farmers and livestock breeders. Starting from the fertile crescent in Asia Minor, it spread throughout Europe and Asia. It began with the so-called single-field agriculture on fertile loess soils, on which perennial cultivation was possible without fertilization. Later, and then in parallel, in the low mountain regions, it was mainly field-forest rotation farming, in which cereal cultivation, pasture and firewood use alternated in multi-year cycles. The next step was two-field farming from Roman times to the Middle Ages, in which fallow periods were interspersed to allow the soil to recover and fertilization became more important. With three-field farming, the growing population could usually be adequately nourished until the beginning of the modern era, at least in the climatically favorable phase of the High Middle Ages. A further breakthrough came with the “improved three-field system” at the beginning of the modern era, in which legumes were grown to increase nitrogen and more root crops, including potatoes, were cultivated in the fallow phases. This form of agriculture was the standard until the 1940s and remains so today in organic farming.
Grassland, on the other hand, hardly changed for many thousands of years and was always used as pasture in addition to the widespread forest pasture. Only since the Middle Ages has there been evidence of its use as a meadow, i.e. grassland from which the grass was harvested and fed to livestock elsewhere as fresh fodder or hay. Grassland became increasingly important from the Middle Ages onwards, as the growing population needed more and more grain and thus more and more livestock or manure was needed to fertilize the fields (the livestock, of course, in addition to feeding and milk production). Grassland became increasingly important as fodder for the production of large quantities of manure. “The meadow is the mother of the field” is a famous quote from the time.
However, agriculture underwent the greatest upheaval since the end of the Stone Age with the intensification in the 1950s, to which the invention of mineral fertilizers and pesticides made a decisive contribution alongside ever-increasing mechanization. This led to an enormous increase in the production of agricultural goods. At the same time, the quality of the produce was improved in many cases and the risk of crop failure was greatly reduced. However, in addition to the fact that the population was once again well supplied after the war with a few years of famine, the well-known negative consequences for nature and the environment have become increasingly apparent in recent decades: the over-fertilization of the soil, including nitrogen and pesticide pollution of water bodies, the standardization of the landscape, the extreme decline in biodiversity due to increasing intensification and the death of farms.
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Sources
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