Agriculture or farming is the exercise of cultivating plant life and livestock. Agriculture became the important thing improvement within side the upward push of sedentary human civilization, where in farming of domesticated species created meals surpluses that enabled humans to stay in cities. The records of agriculture started lots of years ago. After accumulating wild grains starting as a minimum 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers started to plant them round eleven, 500 years ago. Pigs, sheep, and livestock have been domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Plants have been independently cultivated in as minimum eleven areas of the world. Industrial agriculture primarily based totally on large scale monoculture within side the 20th century got here to dominate agriculture out put, eleven though approximately 2 billion humans nevertheless trusted subsistence agriculture.

The principle agricultural merchandise may be extensively grouped into foods, fibers, fuels and uncooked materials. Food training encompass cereals, vegetables, fruits, oils, meat, eggs, and fungi. Over one-0.33 of the world's people are hired in agriculture, 2nd handiest to the carrier sector, even though in current decades, the worldwide fashion of a reducing quantity of agricultural people continues, specifically in growing countries, in which small holding is being overtaken with the aid of using business agriculture and mechanization that brings an significant crop yield increase. Modern agronomy, plant breeding, agrochemicals inclusive of insecticides and fertilizers, and technological traits have sharply elevated crop yields, however purpose ecological and environment damage. Selective breeding and current practices in animal husbandry have further elevated the output of meat however have raised worries approximately animal welfare and environmental damage. Environmental problems encompass contributions to international warming, depletion of aquifers, deforestation, antibiotic resistance, and different agricultural population. Agriculture is each a purpose of and touchy to environmental degradation, inclusive of biodiversity loss, desertification, soil degradation, and international warming, all of that could purpose decreases in crop yield. Genetically changed organisms are extensively used, despite the fact that a few are banned in positive countries.

In the Middle Ages, as compared to the Roman period, agriculture in Western Europe have become extra centered on self-sufficiently. The agriculture populace beneath feudalism become commonly prepared into manors including numerous hundred or extra acres of land presided over through a Lord with a Roman Catholic church and priest. After 1492 the Columbian trade Introduced New World plants including maize, potatoes, tomatoes, candy potatoes and manioc to Europe, and Old World plants including wheat, barley, rice and turnips, and livestock to the Americans.