Agriculture: Definition and Overview

Abstract

Agriculture is the most comprehensive word used to denote the many ways in which crop plants and domestic animals sustain the global human population by providing food and other products. The English word agriculture derives from the Latin ager (field) and colo (cultivate) signifying, when combined, the Latin agricultura: field or land tillage. But the word has come to subsume a very wide spectrum of activities that are integral to agriculture and have their own descriptive terms, such as cultivation, domestication, horticulture, arboriculture, and vegeculture, as well as forms of livestock management such as mixed crop-livestock farming, pastoralism, and transhumance. Also agriculture is frequently qualified by words such as incipient, proto, shifting, extensive, and intensive, the precise meaning of which is not self- evident. Many different attributes are used too to define particular forms of agriculture, such as soil type, frequency of cultivation, and principal crops or animals. The term agriculture is occasionally restricted to crop cultivation excluding the raising of domestic animals, although it usually implies both activities. The Oxford English Dictionary (1971) defines agriculture very broadly as “The science and art of cultivating the soil, including the allied pursuits of gathering in the crops and rearing live stock (sic); tillage, husbandry, farming (in the widest sense).” In this entry, we too use the term in its broadest, inclusive sense.