Agriculture and agrochemicals often get overlooked when people discuss the industries and fields that contribute the most to society. This is understandable. Farms have been around for literally thousands of years. As a result, it’s become easy to take them for granted. Doing so involves ignoring one key fact, though: agriculture may very well be the “backbone” of all civilization.
True, this might sound like an audacious statement to make, but upon closer inspection, it holds up.
Pre-agricultural nomadic tribes
Experts agree that, prior to the development of agriculture, humans were generally hunter-gatherers. They lived in tribes, moving from one area to another to find and consume food. This type of living left little room for art, science, medicine, or any of the countless advances and innovations that are necessary for the growth and success of a society.
It wasn’t that those pursuits served no practical purpose for pre-agricultural tribes—it was simply that the people living in those tribes didn’t have any opportunities to focus on them. It’s widely accepted that the primary reason humans formed communities to begin with was to provide for their own survival. They found that it was easier to survive if they cooperated with others who could support them. In turn, they would offer their own skills and resources to the tribe.
Everyone had a role to play, essentially. Unfortunately, in hunter-gatherer societies, those roles were limited—everyone focused on procuring food and shelter. The demand for self-preservation drove the tribe from one location to another, following the seasons. After they had exhausted the immediately available resources, they moved on. They could not put down roots, and so they could not invest any attention toward endeavors that did not support the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Agriculture changes everything
When humans learned that, instead of pursuing food, they could cultivate it, they had found a completely new way of life that allowed them to abandon the hunter-gatherer approach and adopt one that allowed them to remain in one place.
Although early farming was most likely not easy, it was almost certainly not as physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing as hunter-gatherer living. In addition, agriculture had another benefit: it enabled the human population to grow faster than ever before.
Farmers were able to coax more food out of the land than a hunter-gatherer could ever collect, and they could ensure a more consistent, year-round supply that wasn’t so totally dependent on the whims of nature. Agriculture also allowed for surpluses of food—and because people were sedentary, they could store their surpluses and access them during lean times, as protection against starvation. All these developments made possible a larger, healthier population.
What’s more, in an early agricultural civilization, there was now room (and more people available) to devote energy toward other pursuits, instead of simply those that allowed a tribe to most effectively travel, hunt, and forage. Those who identified the healing properties of certain foods and herbs, for example, could communicate their findings to the rest of the community, allowing them to treat others who were sick or injured; this served as the foundation for the development of medicine.
To make the most of a farm, it was important to have a strong understanding of the role the seasons played in food production, and the best conditions for plants to grow. This resulted in humans acquiring an understanding of subjects like astronomy and botany. With more free time available, members of these early societies began to look for ways in which they could keep themselves occupied. Because of this, we now have sports, theatre, literature, and all the other arts and fields that enrich our lives. While hunter-gatherer living was focused mainly on keeping people alive, agriculture was the first major development in human history that made it possible for the full scope of human activity to flourish.
It also allowed for greater cooperation among different communities. In the past, groups were competing for the few resources available in a particular area. By learning that they could grow their own food, instead of hunting it, there may have been less need to compete with others. They could instead form alliances. Over the centuries, these alliances grew into the geopolitical entities—such as cities and nations—that are familiar today.
Later on, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, agrochemicals played a major role, of course. They greatly increased the amount and quality of food a farm could produce. The advances mentioned above benefited greatly from the use of chemicals that could protect crops from disease, pests, and competing plants.
That’s why it is by no means an exaggeration to claim that agriculture and agrochemicals serve as the backbone of human civilization. Had they never been developed, humans would still be hunting for food, gathering as much of it as they could, and abandoning a region when it no longer served useful to their needs. By giving tribes the ability to grow their food instead of seeking it out, agriculture gave them the chance to truly build their societies.