Intensive Cultivation Fodder at www.japanese-home-gardens.com

The intensive cultivation fodder cultivation of fodder crops made it necessary to abandon the open field system and to make fenced enclosures, both to protect the growing crops and to contain the grazing animals. The four-course rotation [6] replaced the three-course rotation of open fields. This allowed higher productivity and the feeding of more domestic animals, which were also being slowly improved by selective breeding.

The widespread incidence of malnutrition is not primarily due to inadequate world food production. Rather it is due to the inequitable distribution between (and for that matter, within) nations of the food that the world produces. Today, the affluent one-third of the world's population eats well over half the food that is produced. It is not surprising then that amongst the remaining two-thirds malnutrition is rife and that a solution to this imbalance is urgently needed. By the fourteenth century farmers in the Low Countries had begun more intensive cultivation fodder cultivation of cropson the fallow land, mainly grains, root crops and fodder plants - clover, lucerne and rye-grass. The dye crops, madder, woad and saffron, were also cultivated. As mechanical skill developed, a method of drilling seed by machine instead of broadcasting by hand was invented and this was to be one of the foundations of modern mechanical farming.

The last hundred pages of The Physical Earth are devoted to the fruits of the earth. Beginning with a history of agriculture, the first section deals with farming and farm equipment, soil, irrigation, ways of improving and protecting crops, and plant breeding. It was relatively recently—about 10,000 years ago—that man first domesticated animals and discovered how to cultivate and harvest plants. intensive cultivation fodder cultivation dates from the fourteenth century, mechanization from the nineteenth. Today, intensive cultivation fodder farming has combined with mechanization to produce the factory farm.