History of Agriculture

By. Mr. Raghav Sharma.

A fourth South Asian agricultural region, the Ganges River valley, became increasingly developed after about 3000 bp. Although it is clear that some of these changes arose from contact with Indo-European speaking peoples known as Aryans, notions of a devastating Aryan invasion are mistaken and in the past tended to obscure objective research on the region’s history.
Through various forms of exchange, the region saw the introduction of the horse, coinage, the Brahmi script, and the whole corpus of Vedic texts. Written sources of information join the archaeological sources from this point onward. The plow, for example, figures in a hymn of the most ancient of the texts, the Rigveda:Apparently, rice played an important role in the growth of population and the founding of new settlements.
In the later Vedic texts there are repeated references to agricultural technology and practices, including iron implements; the cultivation of a wide range of cereals, vegetables, and fruits; the use of meat and milk products; and animal husbandry. Farmers plowed the soil several times, broadcast seeds, and used a certain sequence of cropping and fallowing. Cow dung provided fertilizer, and irrigation was practiced where necessary.

A more secular eyewitness account is available from Megasthenes , a Greek envoy to the court of the Mauryan empire. In his four-volume Indica he wrote:
India has many huge mountains which abound in fruit-trees of every kind, and many vast plains of great fertility.The greater part of the soil, moreover, is under irrigation, and consequently bears two crops in the course of the year.In addition to cereals, there grows throughout India much millet and much pulse of different sorts, and rice also, and what is called bosporum [Indian millet].

Mr. Raghav Sharma is a professor of Soil Microbiology..