Learning from our farming past

An archaeologist, plant scientist, and agronomist walk into a room. What do you get? Well, in this instance, you get a meeting of expert minds that are investigating ancient farming practices to help to develop more sustainable farming systems today. That is what CropRevive is all about, explains Meriel: “We’re bringing together archaeologists, and plant scientists and agronomists. The latter two have an understanding of crops and the soil while archaeologists are people who understand farming in the past. The purpose of the collaboration is to try and understand how we got to the position we are in today with farming, and how we can improve that position for the future. In particular, we’re looking at crops that people used to grow far more extensively in Ireland over the last few centuries and even millennia, and we are trying to understand what happened to those crops, that they became under-utilised. We want to study how we might be able to encourage farmers to re-engage with these crops and increase production of them again."
Archaeological excavations, says Meriel, happen frequently around the country, particularly with all the roads and houses being built currently. Very often during these excavations, archaeologists come across the remains of houses and settlements that people inhabited in the past, which unearth interesting findings, she explains: “We are able to take samples of soil around the hearths where they were doing their cooking, and around waste pits where they might have dumped leftover food, for instance. In doing that we can find the remains of their food, such as tiny, fragmentary remains of plants, crops, grains, fruit, seeds and nutshells, and by doing that we build up a picture of what people were eating over time.”

6,000 years of farming

The UCD professor describes the knowledge bank that has been built up around historical eating habits: “What we’ve been able to do is build up this really clear picture of exactly what people were eating in Ireland over the last 6,000 years of farming. We’re seeing that in the past, farming systems were more diverse in terms of the variety of crops grown. People were growing different, more varied types of crops in terms of both the plant species and varieties, some of which have disappeared altogether today. Studying these crops makes us realise that many of the crops grew well in the Irish climate, weather and soil, and were quite resilient. They didn’t have the inputs that we have nowadays, they didn’t have the skills and the knowledge that we have nowadays, and still the farmers were able to grow them at scale. Some of these crops were even being grown for export centuries ago.
“We are trying to understand these crops that we don’t grow so much anymore, grain crops like rye and Emmer wheat in terms of the cereals, and also legumes like peas. We can grow them again and we can grow them at scale. The question arises as to what’s preventing us from doing this? So, what we’re doing is building up this picture of what we grew in the past and then trying to see what the barriers are to increased production of those crops today.”

Adapting to change

Meriel emphasises the importance of the CropRevive research: “The big questions around this include our changing climate and how that is going to affect some of these crops. Another challenge is around the kind of systems that we work in and that we farm in, and if there are incentives to grow other crops, why would you bother growing these historic crops? Part of the challenge is trying to work through those different barriers that impede increasing production of older crops.”
Crop resilience is very much to the fore now with the kind of climatic challenges that are affecting food production across the globe. Meriel explains: “We can acknowledge the resilience of many of these historic crops over millennia, certainly over the past thousand years, because they didn’t have access to the kind of crop protectant regimes that we have now. If you think of all these crops, none of them are native to Ireland. They all originated thousands of miles away around the Middle East. They slowly made their way up to Ireland, and they adapted as they went along, and these old varieties further adapted to thrive in Irish growing and soil conditions. "The farmers then didn’t have the crop protectants we have now, they didn’t have the agronomic knowledge, the equipment, the deep ploughing, that are all part of crop production today. They didn’t have all these things that we take for granted nowadays. The CropRevive studies involve thinking about what it was that made these crops resilient and how can that help us in trying to seek resilience in our farming activities and crop production today.”
She continues: “Many of us probably don’t give an awful lot of thought to previous, even, ancient, agriculture and farming practices. But Ireland was an agrarian society; that’s what people lived by and lived on, and today’s agriculture reflects those building blocks over many millennia.”

Mixed farming

Meriel comments on the decline in plant food production over the centuries in Ireland: “What we see is that cropping was more mixed in the past. We see significant evidence of large-scale crop production, as well as animals, but crops were really up there in terms of land use. Over time, two things have happened. Crop production in its entirety has reduced and the proportion of that crop production devoted to the growing of crops for human food has also declined. What we’re seeing in our research is that crop farming was primarily for human food production in the past. That’s changed in Ireland today, with a majority of tillage crops grown for animal feed. In past centuries, the crops themselves were diverse in nature, encompassing a range of different products. Those diverse cropping systems were naturally more resilient because of the broad plant species and variety diversity. There was a risk buffering system of having different crops so that if one of them failed, there were alternatives available.” 

Archaeology as a living science

Meriel is adamant that archaeological research has much to offer for agriculture today: “Some people think of archaeology as a dead science. I consider it a living science. There’s so much more to be discovered. It’s all about people, and it’s about finding out who we are today, and to do that we need to find out where we came from, and how we came to be where we are, and to be the people that we are. In terms of farming and those strong food production traditions that we have in Ireland, we need to understand how they developed, and how we can build on them for the future.”