Agribusiness

The Growth and Success of Agribusiness

For purposes of this entry, we may divide agriculture into two periods—traditional agriculture (comprising the vast extent of human prehistory and history) and the agribusiness era (beginning essentially in the Enlightenment, but taking its present form in the Americas in the 20th century).

As agriculture developed into historical time, it was certainly successful as a productive enterprise; its success by 6000 BCE allowed the creation of castes of priests, soldiers, and governors who did not work the land but lived off its surplus. It fed elaborate cities, empires, and crusades. During most of this time, agriculture was governed almost entirely by tradition (each generation doing just what was done in the last), prescription (priests or overlords dictating the allocation of land, the seasons of planting, and the crops to be delivered), and luck—what was available was planted, what grew was harvested. Progress was made, between the origins of agriculture and the end of the medieval period, in choosing the best of the seed to save for each year's planting and in increasingly sophisticated irrigation systems. Where new crops, domesticated animals, or productive trees became available, they were nurtured and cultivated. But agriculture was essentially a fatalistic enterprise, dependent on the luck of weather and on the patience to wait for the crop, and over much of its activity it was open to investment with superstition and consequent fear of change.

Until the Age of Enlightenment agriculture was rarely studied scientifically, with specific intent to increase yield or expand the number of foods available on the market. Unremarked in that period, when the effects of human activities on the planet were considered insignificant, even the earliest agriculture took a devastating toll on the natural environment.

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