Agricultural Contribution: The Gift of Food

The Inca feast of tilling

More precious than the silver the Incans were forced to take from the earth is a food root the Incans seeded into the earth.  The potato, given to the world by the Incans, saved more lives than silver ever has.  Moreover, the lowly potato eventually shifted the power centers of Europe.

Before the conquest, Europeans depended on grain crops which needed warm climates and predictable weather conditions to be harvested.  The colder Northern European countries had to import grains and thus remained dependent on the more stable Southern European grain-growing nations.  With the arrival of the Incans’ potato, which could be grown in cold climates, the Northern European countries were able to feed their masses with a cheap, nutritious crop that needed only four months to harvest.

Five hundred years after the conquest, environmentalists are desperately trying to reconstruct a world where appropriate technology will lead to an atmosphere that is not life-threatening.  Our food, water, and atmosphere are so poisoned that scientists predict a possible future of human species extinction unless rapid and radical changes in the use of technology, chemicals, and energy sources are adapted to a simpler and less consumptively driven lifestyle.  Clues to such a life are buried in the history of suppressed cultures.  The remarkable agricultural system of Caribbean farmers was efficient and abundant.

Mayan and Aztec agriculturalists had developed brilliant methods of irrigation, continuous harvesting, and recycling of waste.  In the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan the chinampa system of organic farming fed over one hundred thousand inhabitants by adapting the city to its location on a lake.  The Aztec farming experts created floating plots of land where food crops or gardens of flowers flourished. 

This intricate terraced cultivation had been in use for over fifteen hundred years before Cortes destroyed Tenochititlan, the ancient city whose wealth, in the eyes of the Europeans, lay in gold and slaves, not an urban geography of beauty, abundance, and unparalleled environmental architecture.

http://www.sfu.ca/archaeology/museum/laarch/inca/age.html

http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodmaya.html

The Power of a Potato 

Incas planting crops

With the new calorie source and the new source of nutrition, the potato-fed armies of Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia began pushing against their southern neighbors.  During the Age of the Enlightenment these northern cultures wrestled free from the economic, cultural and political domination of the South.  Power shifted toward Germany and Britain and away from Spain and France, and finally all were eclipsed by Russia…[Russia’s] adoption of the potato as their staple food preceded their rise as a world power.

American foods (including corn and varieties of beans) brought about the miracle that centuries of prayer, work, and medicine had been unable to do: they cured Europe of the episodic famines that had been one of the major restraints on the population for millennia.

Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers, 69-71

Aztec Environmental Engineering 

Aztecs farmers

The chinampa…is anchored by roots of the ahuehuete tree and by posts and vine walls.  Mud from the canals is piled up on a bed of wattles and vines, and layers of water weeds which serve as compost form the upper section of the plot.  This is covered with a layer of fresh mud, which provides a fertile medium for planting.  The chinampa plots are usually surrounded by an intricate network of canals.  These canals are stocked with carp and other fish, and a giant salamander called axolotl, which is considered a delicacy.  The canals also provide organic fertilizer and mulch in the form of abundant green algae which is skimmed off the water and applied to the plots….Human wastes were collected, treated, and recycled as fertilizer without polluting its indispensable canals.  Urine was collected separately, broken down, and two of its by-products were paint and sulphate of ammonia.  This was all part of a rhythm or recycling that had become as natural as breathing.

Jan Carew, Fulcrums of Change, 151-153

http://www.zum.de/whkmla/sp/0910/page/page2.html