AGRICULTURAL SCIENCES

the sciences dealing with farm production, including soil cultivation, water control, crop growing and harvesting, animal husbandry, the processing of plant and animal products, engineering, economics, and other related matters. The agricultural industry that is the focus of study includes farming, concerned with production; service industries, concerned with making or supplying machinery, buildings, fertilizers, and pesticides; and the first purchasers of farm products, such as processors, distributors, and marketing boards. In prehistoric times, religion and farming were closely allied. When agriculture was invented (about 80006000 BC), the first agricultural teachers were the priests. Apart from references in some ancient inscriptions, the first recorded instruction book was the Works and Days of Hesiod (probably 8th century BC). Like that of the priests, his instruction was largely seasonal and based on predictable astronomic events, thus: Then after the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion have set, then remember again to begin your seasonal ploughing. By the 16th century AD the link between religion or astronomy and agriculture had weakened, and the advent of printing led to many secular printed books, such as Thomas Tusser's Points of Husbandry (1557) and works on agronomy by Bernard Palissy (151089). In the 18th century, progressive landowners started early versions of the field trials of today. There was, however, no formal agricultural education or research until 1796, when a special academy was founded at Keszthely, Hung.; and professorships of agriculture and rural economy were founded at the universities of Edinburgh (1790) and Oxford (1796) in Great Britain. Meanwhile, in France and Germany, Albrecht Thaer, S.F. Hermstdt, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, and, in particular, Justus von Liebig were laying the foundations of agricultural research. In England, Rothamsted Experimental Station, the oldest research centre in continuous operation, and the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester started before 1850. But probably the key date in the history of agricultural research and education is 1862, when the U.S. Congress set up the Department of Agriculture and provided for colleges (many now incorporated in state universities) of agricultural and mechanical arts in each state. This legislation heralded a movement that spread across the world from the second half of the 19th century onward; after World War II, it gathered increasing momentum. Today most sovereign countries have practical courses and extension (i.e., farmers' advisory) services and at least one university with a faculty of agriculture, teaching such subjects as biochemistry, physics and agrometeorology, soil science, engineering, botany, crop physiology, animal physiology and nutrition, genetics, entomology, plant and animal pathology, farming systems and production methods, human nutrition, and food processing. Applied statistics and operational mathematics (e.g., linear programming of least-cost livestock rations) are essential research tools for these disciplines and permit a quantitative intellectual rigour that enables agricultural science to contribute to the basic natural and social sciences as much as it receives from them.