Agriculture Directory

This directory contains the informational websites regarding the agriculture sector. Agriculture is now the science, art, and business of cultivating soil, producing crops, and raising livestock; farming. Agriculture is science and practice of producing crops and livestock from the natural resources of the earth. The primary aim of agriculture is to cause the land to produce more abundantly and at the same time to protect it from deterioration and misuse.

The diverse branches of modern agriculture include agronomy, horticulture, economic entomology, animal husbandry, dairying, agricultural engineering, soil chemistry, and agricultural economics. Farming was often intimately associated with landholding and therefore with political organization. In Asia large holdings by the nobles, partly arising from feudalism produced a similar pattern.

In the middle ages, increasing communications, the commercial revolution, it is tended to turn agriculture away from subsistence farming toward the growing of crops for sale outside the community i.e. commercial agriculture. The appearance of mechanical devices such as the sugar mill and cotton gin helped to support the system of large plantations based on a single crop.

The Industrial Revolution swelled the population of towns and cities and increasingly forced agriculture into greater integration with general economic and financial patterns. In the era of mechanized agriculture began with the invention of such farm machines as the reaper, the cultivator, the thresher, and the combine. Other revolutionary innovations, e.g., the tractor, continued to appear over the years, leading to a new type of large-scale agriculture. Modern science has also revolutionized food processing; refrigeration, for example, has made possible the large meatpacking plants and shipment and packaging of perishable foods.