Page 497 - Biosystems Engineering

CHAPTER 17

Agriculture

Management

†
Wouter Saeys, Bijoy Chandra Ghosh,
*
†
Erich Vareed Thomas, and Ahindra Nag ‡

17.1 Introduction
In prehistoric times, humans used to gather food from forests. Around
10,000 years ago, humans discovered that by planting seeds, they
could grow plants that gave them food; this activity gradually became
more and more systematic, known as cultivation. The practice of culti-
vating land for growing crops is known as agriculture (agriculture is
-
the English adaptation of the Latin word agricultura, from ager, “a
-
field,” and cultura, “cultivation,” in the strict sense of “tillage of the
soil”). Thus, an agricultural land is a human-managed ecosystem,
which is managed scientifically to achieve maximum sustained
productivity.
Due to the increase in population, the demand for food grains has
increased tremendously. To be able to feed all these extra people, food
production should grow at least as fast as the world population. How-
ever, in 1995/1996 there were already 839 million undernourished
people. Thus, if we want to halve the number of undernourished by
2015, as is the target of the World Food Summit, we should make sure
that crop production increases significantly faster. To maintain a
steady supply of food, farmers have several systematic activities for
managing the soil—water, pest control, fertilizer applications, use of
high-yielding seeds, and the like—spread over a period of time.

∗ Biosystems Department, K.U. Leuven, Heverlee, Belgium.
† Department of Food and Agriculture Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology,
Karagpur, India.
‡ Natural Product Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology,
Karagpur, India.
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