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Draft:Original research/Agriculture

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The image shows a field in China on a fair weather day. Credit: Hijirikyou.

Agriculture is the science, art, or practice of farming, including cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops and the rearing of animals to provide food, wool, and other products.

At right are farm buildings with trees surrounded by fields on a fair weather day.

Farming

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These three false-color images demonstrate some of the applications of remote sensing in precision farming. Credit: Susan Moran, Landsat 7 Science Team and USDA Agricultural Research Service.

Def. the "business of cultivating land, raising stocks etc."[1] is called farming.

"These three false-color images [on the right] demonstrate some of the applications of remote sensing in precision farming. The goal of precision farming is to improve farmers’ profits and harvest yields while reducing the negative impacts of farming on the environment that come from over-application of chemicals. The images were acquired by the Daedalus sensor aboard a NASA aircraft flying over the Maricopa Agricultural Center in Arizona."[2]

"The top image shows the color variations determined by crop density (also referred to as #147;Normalized Difference Vegetation Index”, or NDVI), where dark blues and greens indicate lush vegetation and reds show areas of bare soil."[2]

"The middle image is a map of water deficit, derived from the Daedalus’ reflectance and temperature measurements. Greens and blues indicate wet soil and reds are dry soil."[2]

"The bottom image shows where crops are under serious stress, as is particularly the case in Fields 120 and 119 (indicated by red and yellow pixels). These fields were due to be irrigated the following day."[2]

Theoretical agriculture

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Def. a "plant, especially a cereal, grown to be harvested as food,[3] livestock fodder or fuel or for any other economic purpose"[4] is called a crop.

Def. the "art or science of cultivating the ground, including the harvesting of crops, and the rearing and management of livestock"[5] is called agriculture.

Agronomy

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Main resource: Agronomy
This is the Agronomy Seed House at the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota in the USA. Credit: AlexiusHoratiusAlexiusHoratius.

Def. the "science of utilizing plants, animals and soils for food, fuel, feed, and fiber [and more][6]"[7] is called agronomy.

"To do this effectively and sustainably, agronomy encompasses work in the areas of plant genetics, plant physiology, meteorology, [animal sciences][6] and soil science."[7]

Forestry

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Main resource: Forestry
This shows some of the effects of forestry work in Austria. Credit: Queryzo.

Def. the "art, practice and science of planting and growing trees in forests"[8] is called forestry.

"Continuous cover forestry (CCF) is not a new idea in forest management but there has been renewed interest in it for the potential it has to meet the sustainability requirements which are part of the Rio/Helsinki process and certification. Broadly speaking CCF includes those silvicultural systems which involve continuous and uninterrupted maintenance of forest cover and which avoid clearcutting."[9]

Horticulture

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Main resource: Horticulture

Def. the "art or science of cultivating gardens"[10] is called horticulture.

Gardening

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Def. "the process or action of cultivating of the soil particularly in"[11] an "outdoor area containing one or more types of plants"[12] is called gardening.

Soils

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This is a diagram and related photograph of soil layers from bedrock to soil. Credit: Carlosblh.
Surface-water-gley is developed in glacial till, Northern Ireland. Credit: HolgerK.
Soil Profile: Darkened topsoil and reddish subsoil soil horizons are typical in humid subtropical climates. Credit: US Department of Agriculture.

"In soil, estimates are that 80 to 99% of the microorganisms remain unidentified (1)."[13]

"The soil at the Arlington site is a Plano silt-loam. The 20-cm-deep A horizon is a silt-loam and contains 4.4% organic matter. The loess mantel is >1.25 m deep. Four 2.5-cm-diameter soil cores were taken from the top 10 cm of a clover-grass pasture at the Arlington Agricultural Research Station. The soil samples were immediately placed on dry ice, mixed, and then stored at -70°C prior to DNA extraction. Soil analysis was done by the Soil Testing Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin—Madison as described by Schulte et al. (40). The soil sample contained 13% sand, 70% silt, 17% clay, 4.4% organic matter, 0.3% total N, 400 ppm of K+, and 98 ppm of P. The soil pH was 6.5. The site is well drained, with groundwater more than 25 m below the surface. Two-thirds of the 79-cm annual rainfall occurs from April to October. The site has an average of 165 frost-free days."[13]

In the image on the right, A, B, and C represent the soil profile: A is the topsoil; B is a regolith; C is a saprolite, a less-weathered regolith; the bottom-most layer represents the bedrock.

Middle Bronze Ages

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Fresco of The Fisherman is from Akrotiri, Santorini, Greece at a height of 1.10 m. Credit: Yann Forget.{{free media}}

The Middle Bronze Ages begin about 4100 b2k and end about 3550 b2k.

"A superheated blast from the skies obliterated cities and farming settlements north of the Dead Sea around 3,700 years ago, preliminary findings suggest."[14]

"Radiocarbon dating and unearthed minerals that instantly crystallized at high temperatures indicate that a massive airburst caused by a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere instantaneously destroyed civilization in a 25-kilometer-wide circular plain called Middle Ghor."[15]

"The event also [may have] pushed a bubbling brine of Dead Sea salts over once-fertile farm land."[15]

"People did not return to the region for 600 to 700 years."[15]

"Excavations at five large Middle Ghor sites, in what’s now Jordan, indicate that all were continuously occupied for at least 2,500 years until a sudden, collective collapse toward the end of the Bronze Age. Ground surveys have located 120 additional, smaller settlements in the region that the researchers suspect were also exposed to extreme, collapse-inducing heat and wind. An estimated 40,000 to 65,000 people inhabited Middle Ghor when the cosmic calamity hit."[15]

"The most comprehensive evidence of destruction caused by a low-altitude meteor explosion comes from the Bronze Age city of Tall el-Hammam, where a team [...] has been excavating for the last 13 years. Radiocarbon dating indicates that the mud-brick walls of nearly all structures suddenly disappeared around 3,700 years ago, leaving only stone foundations."[15]

"What’s more, the outer layers of many pieces of pottery from [the] same time period show signs of having melted into glass. Zircon crystals in those glassy coats formed within one second at extremely high temperatures, perhaps as hot as the surface of the sun."[15]

"High-force winds created tiny, spherical mineral grains that apparently rained down on Tall el-Hammam."[15]

"An apparent meteor blast over a sparsely populated Siberian region in 1908, known as the Tunguska event, killed no one but flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest. And a meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 injured more than 1,600 people, mainly due to broken glass from windows that were blown out."[14]

Hypotheses

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Main resource: Hypotheses
  1. A farm may be as small as an individual tract of land to as large as a country.

See also

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References

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  1. ↑ Vildricianus (7 January 2006). "farming". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 24 February 2020. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Susan Moran (30 January 2001). Precision Farming. Washington, DC: NASA. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=1139. Retrieved 2016-02-07. 
  3. ↑ Widsith (7 April 2006). "crop". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 1 December 2018. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  4. ↑ VZakharov (15 March 2011). "crop". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 1 December 2018. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  5. ↑ 193.144.127.11 (11 August 2004). "agriculture". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 2012-08-07. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 132.203.63.202 (11 March 2008). "agronomy". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 2012-08-07. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 12.216.45.0 (10 December 2007). "agronomy". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 2012-08-07. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  8. ↑ Hekaheka (27 August 2007). "forestry". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 24 February 2020. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  9. ↑ A. Pommerening and S.T. Murphy (2004). "A review of the history, definitions and methods of continuous cover forestry with special attention to afforestation and restocking". Forestry 77 (1): 27-44. doi:10.1093/forestry/77.1.27. http://forestry.oxfordjournals.org/content/77/1/27.full.pdf. Retrieved 2016-02-07. 
  10. ↑ horticulture. San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. October 8, 2013. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horticulture. Retrieved 2013-10-25. 
  11. ↑ "gardening". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. October 8, 2013. Retrieved 2013-10-25.
  12. ↑ "garden". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. October 15, 2013. Retrieved 2013-10-25.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 James Borneman, Paul W. Skroch, Katherine M. O'Sullivan, James A. Palus, Norma G. Rumjanek, Jennifer L. Jansen, James Nienhuis, and Eric W. Triplett (June 1996). "Molecular Microbial Diversity of an Agricultural Soil in Wisconsin". Applied and Environmental Microbiology 62 (6): 1935-43. http://aem.asm.org/content/62/6/1935.short. Retrieved 2013-11-21. 
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Bruce Bower (November 20, 2018). "An exploding meteor may have wiped out ancient Dead Sea communities". Science News. Retrieved 21 May 2019.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 15.6 Phillip Silvia (November 20, 2018). "An exploding meteor may have wiped out ancient Dead Sea communities". Science News. Retrieved 21 May 2019.
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