Agriculture
The methods used to cultivate crops are described extensively by Pliny in Books 18 to 28. He praises Cato the elder and his work De Agri Cultura, which he uses as a primary source. Pliny's work includes discussion of all known cultivated crops and vegetables, as well as herbs and remedies derived from them. It is also a source for some interesting devices and machines used in cultivation and processing the crops. For example, he describes a simple mechanical reaper that cut the ears of wheat and barley without the straw and was pushed by oxen (Book XVIII, chapter 72). This device was forgotten in late antiquity or the early middle ages, during which period reapers reverted to using scythes and sickles to gather crops. It is depicted on a bas-relief from the later Roman period found at Trier.
Read more about this topic: Natural History (Pliny)
Famous quotes containing the word agriculture:
“In past years, the amount of money that has had to be been spent on armaments, great and small, instead of on productive industry and agriculture and the arts, has been a disgrace to all of us in every part of the world.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“But the nomads were the terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of the market had induced to build towns. Agriculture therefore was a religious injunction, because of the perils of the state from nomadism.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)