Agriculture is stated as the production of food and other goods from plants. It has played the key role in bringing the human civilization. Through agriculture different species of plants are produced. Agricultural science is the study of agriculture. Since the development of this field of science, it has expanded geographically. During this expansion experiments were performed and plants were adapted through cross-breeding to get new and different varieties of crops were obtained. Even now, agriculturists along with botanists perform experiments to yield new varieties of plants whether they are edible or ornamental plants. Irrigation, crop rotation and fertilizers were practiced a long time ago but during the last century, these practices has done tremendous work and crops yield increased. Agriculturists even invented new methods along with the old ones to get better production of crops. In the past agriculture has played a major role in humans' life because many countries' economy depended on agriculture. Even now, agriculture is the major source of economy of many countries such as Pakistan, China and some European countries.
As described earlier, agriculture has played a vital role in human civilization. The majority of the population of the world practiced agriculture and fulfilled their economic needs. We can say that agriculture and human civilization go side by side. In the past century new technique was practiced called Haber-Bosch method which synthesizes ammonium nitrate. This method has decreased the requirement of animal manure and recycling nutrients with crop rotation. Chemicals such as rock phosphate, pesticides and fertilizers have increased the productivity of crops and now there are fewer chances that crops get damaged by pests. As the yield of crops has increased, so grains are supplied to livestock. Due to this, animals give more milk and meat and there are fewer chances that they suffer from diseases.
Crop production system varies among farms and it depends on the resources, geography, and climate of the farm, government policy and various economic and social pressures of politics. In under developing countries, it is difficult to get healthy crops because the methods which are practiced in agriculture are expensive, so farmers use animals' dung as fertilizers. These fertilizers do not give the good yield of crops. If fertilizers and pesticides are useful for the crops and they give good yield, they are harmful too. If the crop is of edible plants, then nutrition rate decreases and due to these chemicals, when humans consume such food they get higher chances of diseases.
In some countries, there are areas such as subtropical and arid areas where agriculture depends totally on rain. Such crops do not need water from human sources but they produce well when rain falls on them. But then in such areas multiple crops cannot produce or these areas do not need irrigation.
Biotechnology plays an important role in the field of agriculture. Crops are bred by pollination, cross pollination and molecular techniques. Molecular techniques genetically modify the crops. Green revolution has introduced the conventional hybridization which increases the yield by creating high yielding varieties.
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