Agriculture paper on your chosen culture Assignment

Agriculture paper on your chosen culture - Assignment Example The goosefoot, sump weed and sunflowers were the first crops to be domesticated and cultivated by the Native American Indians, most especially along the Mississippi River (Agriculture American Indian, 2003). The development of agriculture advanced with the invention of further agricultural methods such as irrigation, which allowed the American Indians to produce food crops constantly, resulting in the beginning of the cultivation of corn starting 3400 A.D. Thus, by 1000 A.D., the Native American Indians had already narrowed down their crop cultivation to three major food crops namely the corn, squash and beans (Nabhan, 1989). By the time of the European contact, the Native Indian Americans were already producing food at a large scale, capable of keeping their community throughout the year without shortages. The food crop production methods of the American Indian did not entail fertilizing the land using organic matter. On the contrary, they maintained soil fertility through planting their crops as a mixture of corn, beans and squash within the same piece of land, allowing the crops to re-fertilize the land though nitrogen fixation. The custom of the Native Indian Americans was to abandon the exhausted land once it proved to start becoming less productive, and in turn cleared other new lands (Hurt, 1987). Further development and civilization saw the development of village sovereignty, which claimed certain territories of land as their own, and then tilled the land to provide for the village community. The family lineage system was also recognized as the basis of land ownership among the village residents, where the family heads could be allocated specific pieces land for their own agricultural production (Agriculture American Indian, 2003). However, following the European contact and the subsequent settlement of the Europeans in North America, different Native American