Gabriel Almeida
Preface:
My name is Gabriel Almeida, and this portfolio is called Farming by the Land. The licensing I will be using is CC BY 4.0.
Introduction:
The main focus of this portfolio is to look at how civilizations have adapted to their different lands and utilized their environments for farming and survival. Civilizations all around the world have survived for thousands of years whether people lived in mountains in Peru or people lived by the sea in Japan, the people adapted to their environments and utilized the landscape for their survival. The main purpose of this portfolio is to show how effective and stunning these man made farms can be by just by utilizing the landscape. I have focused this portfolio on three distinct areas that their farming benefited from the landscape. These are Paddy fields in Nepal,
Theme:
Their are two main themes that this portfolio will be focusing on. The first is the beauty of farming with the landscape and not terraforming or destroying the land leaving it unrecognizable. Many natural wonders of the world have been destroyed for their land or for resources but utilizing the lands and basing the farms around them brings a certain beauty to it. The second theme is that these types of farms and gardening bring a certain sense of culture and origin to them. Since these ways are farming are very distinct to the lands the farms show our ancestors history and provides a way for us to look back at our past.
“Paddy fields of Nepal” by CS Sharada Prasad is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The first image is of a Paddy field, a rice field, in Nepal. For thousands of years rice has been and will continue to be a staple crop in Nepal as it is in many cultures due to its abundance in output. The earliest signs of rice cultivation came from Asia during 7000-5000 bce making Nepal possibly the earliest form of rice cultivation in the world. Nepal is composed of many ginormous mountains including the tallest point on Earth Mount Everest. Due to this high level of altitude and mountainous environment the people of Nepal were not given much land to work with for farming. They needed to come up with something that would not be too taxing on the farmers and would provide them with plenty of crops.
The farmers would need to terraform the land in order to grow crops because of the mountainous region indigenous to Nepal. These fields are called patty fields because the crops are half submerged in water and are famous for providing such plentyful crops with such little use of land. They maintain the paddy rice fields by weeding, maintaining, and harvesting the crops when ready. Paddy fields not only show the history of Asian culture but also provided the world with a method for farming that is still primarily used today in mountainous regions. These fields show the beauty of the mountains of Nepal but also show the brilliance of the farmers that came up with this method of farming thousands of years ago.
