Around 10,000 years ago, human civilization learnt how to plant food crops in order to maintain tribes, villages, and towns. Learning agricultural practices leads to population expansion, settlement, and leisure time for people. People used to hunt and gather food like other animals on the earth’s surface in the past. The hunted food was sufficient to feed them but not to thrive. As a result of agriculture providing numerous food crops, people stopped hunting and gathering. The downside of growing food crops, on the other hand, is that it causes soil degradation and the loss of habitat for wild animals.I feel agriculture has been advantageous to humans because it allows settlement, job specification and increased food availability. The advent of agriculture had caused an exponential growth of food availability unlike in the past when our evolutionary ancestors had to gather edible food in the forests. Agriculture provided early people with enough food to support more offspring. Therefore, it led to increment in family sizes as result of a significant starvation decrease. Agriculture also helped individuals with nomadic tendencies to settle down and concentrate on their farms because crop growing requires constant attention. Growing of crops made such people to build shelters and irrigation in specific places where they could store food, raise livestock and establish a government. Agriculture also helped humans to acquire job specification. For instance, cultural activities such as building, tool and cloth making emerged due to increase in demand for agricultural items. The need for such goods enabled people to specialise in different tasks for trade.
The various disadvantages of humans shifting to a more sedentary society include environmental degradation and increase in labour. Sedentariness triggers environmental hazards that lead to deforestation, soil loss and loss of many native species of plants and animals. Raising crops is a given place also requires much more labour than foraging because people have to prepare the land, plant crops and protect them from predators before harvesting.
