Draft:Original research/Agriculture

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
Def. the "business of cultivating land, raising stocks etc." 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

Theoretical agriculture
Def. a "plant, especially a cereal, grown to be harvested as food, livestock fodder or fuel or for any other economic purpose" 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" is called agriculture.

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

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

Forestry
Def. the "art, practice and science of planting and growing trees in forests" 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."

Horticulture
Def. the "art or science of cultivating gardens" is called horticulture.

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

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

"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."

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
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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

Hypotheses

 * 1) A farm may be as small as an individual tract of land to as large as a country.