Farming

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

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

In Eurasia, the Sumerians started to live in villages from about 8,000 BC, relying on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and a canal system for irrigation. Ploughs appear in pictographs around 3,000 BC; seed-ploughs around 2,300 BC. Farmers grew wheat, barley, vegetables such as lentils and onions, and fruits including dates, grapes, and figs.

In Ancient Egypt farming started in the predynastic period at the end of the Paleolithic, after 10,000 BC. Staple food crops were grains such as wheat and barley, alongside industrial crops such as flax and papyrus.

Precision 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."

Hypotheses

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