A horticultural system of cultivation is characterized by

Horticulture is small scale, low intensity farming. This subsistence pattern involves at least part time planting and tending of domesticated food plants. Pigs, chickens, or other relatively small domesticated animals are often raised for food and prestige. Many horticultural societies supplement their farming subsistence base with occasional hunting and gathering of wild plants and animals. Horticulturalist population densities are higher than those of most foragers and pastoralists. Usually, there are at least 1-10 people per square mile with community sizes ranging from around 30 to several hundred. In most cases, horticulture is more productive than foraging (with the exception of aquatic foraging). Some horticulturalists are not only subsistence farmers but also produce a small surplus to sell or exchange in local markets for things that they cannot produce themselves.

Pigs raised for food and sale on a
small horticultural farm in Colombia

Women from a Papua New Guinea horticultural village selling fruits and
vegetables in a small town market

Horticulture is still practiced successfully in tropical forest areas in the Amazon Basin and on mountain slopes in South and Central America as well as low population density areas of Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and Melanesia
. In the past, it was a common subsistence base elsewhere in the world until population densities rose to high levels and people were forced to develop more intensive farming methods.

Major horticulturalist regions during the 20th century

Horticulturalists usually have a shifting pattern of field use. When production drops due to the inevitable depletion of soil nutrients, horticulturalists move to a new field or a long fallow one to plant their crops. They clear the wild vegetation with a slash and burn technique. Brush and small trees are cut down and allowed to dry out in place. They are then burned. This simultaneously clears the field of all but large trees and adds ash to the soil surface. The ash acts as a fertilizer. No other fertilizer is applied to the field. As a result, soil productivity lasts only for a few years.

    Hillside field in Colombia cleared of     wild vegetation by the slash and burn
    technique (note the ash covered soil)

Colombian horticulturalists using hand tools to work their land in
preparation for planting

Horticulturalists do not have large beasts of burden to pull plows. Likewise, they don't have mechanized farming equipment such as tractors or rototillers. They use pointed sticks, hoes, or other hand tools to make holes in the soil to plant their seeds, tubers, and cuttings. This is a labor intensive but not capital intensive form of farming. Pesticides and herbicides are not used by traditional subsistence horticulturalists. Likewise, irrigation is rarely used.

Like pastoralists, many horticultural societies in the past carried out periodic inter-village raiding in which people were killed. The goal was usually revenge for perceived wrongs and, at times, the theft of women, children, dogs, and other things of value. The horticulturalists of New Guinea and the Amazon Basin were particularly interested in raiding their neighbors. The Yanomam�
of Venezuela and Brazil are one of the most well documented aggressive horticultural peoples. The ethnographer Napoleon Chagnon reported that in the past as many as 1/3 of Yanomam� men died of injuries acquired in raids.

Misunderstandings about Horticulturalists

People in the industrialized nations with advanced intensive agriculture have for a long time had a distinctly ethnocentric model of farming. When indigenous horticultural societies were encountered, they were assumed to be relatively unproductive and ignorant of soils and plant nutrients. Slash and burn field clearance practices were seen as being destructive of the environment. In fact, the knowledge and farming skills displayed by indigenous horticulturalists often has been surprisingly detailed and practical with regard to soils, plants, and cropping techniques.

Hanun�o men

   Many different food crops growing    together in the same Colombian    farm plot (big leafed banana plants    provide shade for the more sun
   sensitive crops)

In the early 1950's, the Hanun�o
mountain people of Mindoro Island in the Philippines were studied by the ethnographer Harold Conklin. These horticulturalists recognized 10 principle and 30 derivative soil categories. They also understood the suitability of each soil for their crops as well as the effects of erosion and over-farming. They distinguished 1500 useful plants including 430 cultigens and they identified minute differences in plant structures. All of this detailed knowledge was unexpected among horticulturalists. The Hanun�o usually grew as many as 40 different crops in the same field. As a result, their vegetable gardens looked more like a tangle of wild vegetation than our modern rows of crops. This multi-cropping allowed them to have successive harvests throughout the growing season, while the dense vegetation of their crops broke the erosional force of rain and shielded delicate plants from the sun.

Multi-cropping is a common horticultural practice. Mesoamerican horticulturalists carefully plant corn, bean, and squash seeds in the same hole. As the corn stock grows up, it provides support for the climbing bean plant. The squash grows over the ground and keeps down the weeds.

Another example of the practical farming knowledge of horticulturalists was found among the Birom
people of the Jos Plateau in north central Nigeria. An important food of the Birom was the tiny seeds from a grass that they called acha. This cereal crop was traditionally grown in fields without the use of added fertilizers. During the first half of the 20th century when Nigeria was still a British colony, colonial officials concluded that the Birom were ignorant of the effects of fertilizer because they did not put manure on their fields. In fact, the acha crops failed when the Birom were induced by government officials to fertilize them. Acha grows too quickly in enriched soils, falls over from its own weight, and rots before its seeds are ripe. Following this failed experiment, the Birom were allowed to return to their traditional farming practices.

Economic Advantages of Horticulture

Horticulture is particularly well suited to humid, tropical conditions. In such environments, temperatures and rainfall are usually high, there are no cold seasons, and plants usually grow vigorously year round. In these areas, nutrients are mainly locked in growing plants rather than in the soil. Energy cycles through the food chain rapidly. Plants flourish, die, quickly decompose, and the nutrients are taken up by growing plants. When forestry product corporations in tropical regions cut down the trees and haul them off for lumber, they remove most of the nutrients leaving the soil impoverished. In addition, clear cutting tropical forests exposes the soil to rainfall and intense sunlight. As a result, the organic components are leached out and the soil erodes away leaving a waste land.

In contrast, horticulturalists usually leave the big trees in place in and around their farm plots. Tree roots help to stabilize the soil. Burning the other wild vegetation converts chemical compounds locked in the plants to a form that is readily useable by their food crops. Planting many different species in the same field assures that the soil remains covered with vegetation throughout most of the year. This protects it from erosion. When the labor input rises to an unreasonable level in a few years, the farm plot is abandoned and allowed to revert to the original natural vegetation again. The decline in productivity is usually due to a combination of the loss of nitrates and potassium from the soil as well as growing competition from weeds and insect pests.

Colombian horticulturalist woman spinning wool to
produce her own clothing

Most temperate zone intensive agricultural techniques are generally inappropriate for tropical forest areas. Plows expose too much soil to the elements. Massive amounts of fertilizer must be added to the soil regularly due to the leaching effect of heavy rain fall. Because mono-cropping is the usual practice with this kind of agriculture, the crops are often more susceptible to being wiped out by insects, fungal infections, and other parasites. As a result, pesticides and herbicides must be heavily used. Large domestic animals for pulling plows and wagons are often restricted in the tropics by insect-borne diseases. This is particularly true of Central Africa. Tractors and other mechanized pieces of equipment powered by internal combustion engines are usually too costly for most nations that have extensive tropical forest lands. These large-scale agriculture methods are not labor intensive but they are expensive. For instance, in North America, it takes about 2 pounds of oil to produce one pound of wheat. In contrast, horticulture is labor intensive but not capital intensive.

Horticulture is only economically practical as long as the population density remains low and land for new fields is readily available. When horticulturalists are not permitted to practice their usual field shifting pattern of farming, the result is soil depletion and poverty. This has been the case in the last 30 years in parts of the Amazon Basin of Brazil and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo as a result of over population and government schemes to send urban poor families into the forests to become low income farmers on small plots of land.

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Intensive agriculture is the primary subsistence pattern of large-scale, populous societies. It results in much more food being produced per acre compared to other subsistence patterns. Beginning about 5,000 years ago, the development of intensive farming methods became necessary as the human population grew in some major river valleys to levels beyond the carrying capacity of the environment using horticulture and pastoralism. The transition to intensive agriculture was originally made possible by water management systems and the domestication of large animals for pulling plows. This allowed farmers to get below the top soil to bring buried nutrients up to the surface. It also allowed farmers to maintain much larger fields of crops.

Heavily fertilized and irrigated hillside terraced fields used for intensive rice farming in
Indonesia

Rice production in China using gasoline driven rototillers (top left) and large amounts of hand labor
for planting

The first intensive agricultural societies were the ancient civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia (now Iraq and eastern Syria), India and Pakistan, North China, Mesoamerica, and Western South America. Today, intensive agriculture is the primary food production pattern in all developed nations except those that are too arid or too cold for any form of farming outside of greenhouses. Over the last century, large-scale agricultural techniques spread rapidly throughout the world with the introduction of farm machines driven by internal combustion engines and the availability of commercially produced fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. This essentially resulted in the industrialization of farming in the richer nations.

Centers of ancient intensive agriculture based civilizations

The transition to intensive agriculture brought with it a number of inevitable major social changes. Permanent year round settlements became necessary because the food source was immobile. As a consequence, more time and effort were expended in building houses that would last for generations. Surplus crops produced by farmers were sold in village markets. Some of these market centers increased in population over time and became towns and eventually cities. There was an evolution of a complex division of labor. Many new kinds of jobs appeared, including merchants, craftsmen, professional soldiers, priests, rulers, and bureaucrats. The emerging urban centers were occupied mainly by these non-food-producing specialists and their families.

Traditional West African ruler (top of the pyramid
of power in his society)

The ancient civilizations became rigidly divided into social classes. The economic and political power of farmers was dramatically decreased as elite groups headed by kings increasingly monopolized power. The ruling class ended up controlling the sources of wealth--i.e, land, water, manufacturing, and trade. This required a radical change in the concept of ownership. In most small-scale societies with less intensive subsistence patterns, economically important properties, such as land and water wells, usually are not owned in the sense that we think of ownership today. Rather, this property is kept in stewardship for the society as a whole. An individual keeps the property only so long as it is being used. Strong pressures of reciprocity within the community require that property be shared or given away rather than hoarded if it is not being used. In order for a wealthy ruling class to emerge, this concept of ownership had to be replaced over time by one in which absolute personal property rights are paramount. This transition allowed for wealth to be accumulated by individuals and passed on to their descendants rather than returned to the society for redistribution. As a result, economic disparities developed between families over time. These disparities gave rise to economic class distinctions and non-egalitarian societies. As these major social changes were occurring, the status and power of women generally declined as well.

Modern Large-Scale Societies

In large-scale societies today, agriculture has become highly efficient, requiring much fewer people to produce the food for everyone else. This is particularly true of mechanized grain farming and ranching. Technological advances in farm production now occur frequently and are spread world wide within a few years. Our new sources and uses of energy often require international trade on a global scale to acquire them. This is particularly true of petroleum products.

A large corporate farm in North America
producing food and fiber only for sale

Automatic seedling planting system used in North America (an example of expensive mechanized farming equipment employed to
reduce labor costs and increase productivity)

21st century dense urban
workplace in North America

Confident woman military pilot (an example of the increased importance of women in post- industrial societies of the early
21st century)

In many of the poor developing nations in the tropical regions of the world, plantation agriculture has increasingly replaced subsistence horticulture. Plantations are large, labor-intensive farms that mostly produce fruit, sugar, fiber, or vegetable oil products for the international market. The laborers usually work for very low wages that keep them in poverty. Many of the plantations of Indonesia, Philippines, Central America, the Caribbean, and West Africa are owned by multinational corporations such as Dole and the National Fruit Company. The net effect of this form of agriculture generally has been the flow of wealth from poor nations in the southern hemisphere to rich ones in the northern hemisphere.

A century ago, the typical North American family lived on a farm in a multi-generational household. Today the common pattern is a nuclear family
household in an urban or suburban environment. The form of the contemporary North American family is largely a result of the demands of the work place. Corporations, governments, and other major employers are often nationwide and even international in their operations. Many commonly require their employees to move from city to city and even country to country every few years. As a result, it is extremely difficult for extended families to remain together in the same community once the children grow up. We have become a people with few long term community roots. It is not surprising that 3/4 of the people living in California today were not born there. This pattern of frequent job related migrations is now occurring across the globe.

We are moving into a post-industrial information-based economy in the U.S. and other economically dominant nations. There is an increasing emphasis on mental rather than hard physical labor. The economic and political power of women has risen significantly in part as a result of this change.

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Over the last 10,000 years, human populations have grown rapidly. This has resulted in increased pressure to produce more food with the same amount of land. As a consequence, our foraging ancestors were forced to change their subsistence patterns radically. Horticulture and pastoralism solved the problem for several thousand years. However, by 5,000 years ago in some regions of the world, intensive agriculture became a necessity. During the 19th and 20th centuries, most of humanity was forced to adopt this means of food production. Accompanying the transition to intensive agriculture was the development of towns, cities, and international commerce.

With each successive stage in this transition, people steadily moved away from a passive dependence on the environment. As human populations grew, more food had to be provided, which inevitably meant that there had to be greater control of food sources. Foragers and pastoralists generally use their environments without changing them significantly. In contrast, regions occupied by the early intensive farming societies were radically altered. Forests were cut down, the land was leveled, and the courses of rivers were altered to provide irrigation water. Many wild plant and animal species came to be defined as weeds or pests and were eradicated. Others were genetically altered through thousands of years of selective breeding to be more useful for people. They became the domesticated food plants and farm animals that are critical to our life today.

Political elites in contemporary society

Societies generally became more complex with each successive stage in this transition from foraging to intensive agriculture. Most foragers had small communities without permanent leaders or other full-time non-food-producing specialists. Their political systems were more or less egalitarian
. Relationships were based mainly on kinship ties and friendship. In contrast, societies that rely on intensive agriculture to supply their food have class stratification and elaborate political systems with hierarchies of leaders and bureaucrats. They are no longer societies of equals. Some individuals become rich and politically powerful through their control of the means of production, while others face conditions of poverty with severe periodic food shortages. This discrepancy in access to resources has been common in large-scale agricultural societies. However, economic inequality was significantly reduced in industrial nations during the 20th century as a result of the evolution of more democratic political systems and taxation that redistributed society's wealth to some degree.

Increased efficiency in food production has resulted in a dramatic rise in the number of non-food-producers. Among foragers, it is common for 100% of the healthy adult population to participate directly in getting food. In Bangladesh, Guatemala, and other relatively poor developing nations today, where farming has not been significantly mechanized, 60-65% of the population are food producers. In the United States, less than 1% of the entire population are still farmers. Those farmers not only provide food and fiber for all of the non-food-producing Americans but also for millions of people elsewhere in the world. It is ironic, that this dramatically increased food production has not resulted in more leisure time. Far from it, Americans now individually work more hours during the year than almost all other nations.

Non-food producing specialists in a modern large-scale agricultural society

The transition to intensive agriculture apparently had a major effect on the spread of human parasitic diseases
. The higher population densities of people resulting from this subsistence pattern made it far easier for contagion to rapidly pass from individual to individual. Major epidemics
of bubonic plague
, small pox, influenza
, and other scourges are far more likely to spread rapidly in towns and cities than among relatively isolated small communities of foragers or horticulturalists. They are also more likely to infect a higher percentage of the people in a dense population. It is not surprising that the global influenza epidemic of 1918 killed 20-40 million people. The number of deaths due to AIDS is likely to be far higher than this during the next 10-20 years. Africa will be especially hard hit by it.

Our large modern cities with their vast areas of concrete and asphalt change the local microclimate by altering the amount of solar energy that is absorbed rather than reflected back out into space. Cities literally become hot spots. These artificial man-made environments also usually experience air and water pollution problems not encountered when our populations were smaller and more dispersed. In addition, our burgeoning populations progressively deplete important natural resources such as drinking water, natural gas, and oil.

Another consequence of the transition to intensive agriculture and large-scale societies has been a change in the nature of warfare. While most foraging societies were peaceful and avoided violent conflicts with other societies when possible, all of the ancient civilizations carried out bloody wars of conquest. Some pastoralist societies were aggressive conquerors as well. As agriculture became more intensive and populations larger in modern times, the scale of war increased dramatically. Far more people were killed as a result of warfare during the 20th century than in any other century in history. Armies were much larger and better equipped with efficient mass killing machines.

Tools of mass warfare used by modern large-scale agricultural societies

On the positive side, however, the 20th century also saw a rapid increase in scientific knowledge and life expectancy in the developed nations. The time between major technological revolutions has shortened to less than a single human generation. By comparison, the lives of our relatively isolated, self-sufficient forager ancestors remained largely unchanged over many generations.

A horticultural system of cultivation is characterized by

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