The skills of gardening or farming is very complex whole thing. Most of the farmlands for Agriculture have already been used up through bad farming systems or practices. Due to this, most of farmlands no longer support good growth of many kinds of crops. We cannot continuously convert forest lands into farmlands since we need to get forest reserves for wildlife conservation, improvement in the rainfall patterns and the entire ecological system. It has become necessary to adopt crop improvement and management practices on few Agricultural lands and at the same time managing the farmlands.
There were many farming systems which came to ruin our forest lands. Among these were shifting cultivation and land rotation systems. These systems were adopted due to the fact that there were many available lands and also population in those days were few. Most forest lands were depleted for farming. This led to the destruction of vegetation as well as endangering most species in the ecosystem. It took more years for the lands to fallow for more Agricultural purposes. But, as population began to increase, there is pressure on farmlands. That led to the kick off these farming practices.
There is higher demand of food and we need to secure the World food crisis. This brought the adoption of early maturing crops for the various kinds of crops that we grow. Lately the cultivation of the late maturing crops have been fading out from our Agricultural system. This is to speed up the rate of our production in our gardens and large scale farming. Either beeing staple crop, cash crops/plantation crops, fruit crops, vegetable crops or oil crops; we have the early maturing ones and the late maturing ones. Now, many Gardeners and Farmers have adopted the lifestyle of growing early maturing ones.
We cannot talk about crops improvement and management practices without talking about "Inputs" like labour, capital and machineries. I mean we cannot pay lip service that we are improving crops for higher productivity for the World while we lack basic necessity for farming for abundant yields. We need to be well equiped with capital for expansion and transformation of Agricultural produce. Capital for acquiring vast lands, for buying inputs like quality seeds and fertilizers. Agrochemicals like herbicides and pesticides to manage crops on the fields.
Applying fertilizer in my maize farm
Due to the fact that most farmlands are very weak, if we rely solely on the natural nutrients in the soil, we would harvest low yield. That's why technology has supported to manufacture fertilizer. Providing the requisite and abundance fertilizers improve the crops to grow. To get the best and higher produce, NPK fertilizer is applied at the initial stage after 2 weeks of sowing. When the maize is on the verge to tassel, you can apply urea or Nitrogen fertilizer as top dressing. This would aid the maize to produce good cobs.
Early maturing seeds have been produced for early production. Plant breeders have well improved varieties of seeds for the various seeds. Fruits like orange, papaya and mangoes have different varieties that grow very quickly. Cash crops like cocoa have hybrid ones that matures and fruit at 2 to 3 years compare to the local ones that can take five years to grow. Most seeds have also been treated and kept for farmers to maximize productivities.
We no longer suffer from weeding our farms waiting for manual labourers like what we used to do in some years back. Herbicides of various kinds have been manufactured for farmers who wish to grow. Combine harvesters and planters have been invented to support speedy harvesting of matured produce to prevent post harvest losses or damage of produce on the field.