Monthly Column: Farming – So Simple and So Necessary
By: Georgius Gotsis Fontes
Veggies From México CEO
Without a doubt, the most important basic need for human survival is food. For thousands of years, this was satisfied by hunting and fruit collecting. But it was in the Neolithic period, ten thousand years ago, that women who collected fruit realized that some seeds germinated, thus initiating farming.
We can see the first signs in Mesopotamia, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt, being wheat, barley, lentils, and chickpeas the first to be mastered.
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The very same variables which affect our sector these days are the ones which affected it thousands of years ago: a warmer climate after the last ice age (climate); the use of tools such as the plow and hoe (technology); and more mouths to feed (demand).
Farming brought along sedentarism, the settlement of cities, and trade. But as Yuval Noah Harari says in his book Sapiens, it also affected the varied diet that people had before; long working days; and diseases due to settlements. He even gets to state that it was not humans who domesticated wheat, but that wheat domesticated humans. In Mexico and Mesoamerica, farming began about seven thousand years ago. Of course, with corn, beans, and squash. And they also used “technology” such as chinampas and milpa (where they put several crops together, which generated a beneficial microenvironment).
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In our state, as Eduardo Frías Sarmiento says in his book “El oro rojo de Sinaloa”, the investment made in irrigation systems with the involvement of the triple helix was essential: farmers, government and banking. We can even go back to 1886 when the federal government granted a concession to Eng. Albert Kinsey Owen to use the lands of Río Fuerte, and although the project was not very successful, it was the first brick of what would come decades later.
In the 40s, when the creation of dams was promoted, one of the most important ones, Sanalona, was built in 1948.
I still hear with nostalgia to old farmers who grew seedlings in seedbeds at ground level. I witnessed the transition from rolling irrigation to drip irrigation in the 90s (even though it was a technology which was over 20 years old). New varieties: resistant varieties and varieties with a long shelf life; tomatoes of various colors and high brix degrees. Productions of 20, 30, 40 kg or more per square meter of tomato with protected farming technology.
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Without a doubt, farming is a clear example of the development of mankind. It is something so simple and yet so complex and necessary. We used to eat rice and corn thousands of years ago and we continue doing it today.
As they say: at least once in your life you will need a doctor, a lawyer, an architect, but every day three times a day you will need a farmer.
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