Religion and Agriculture

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Religion-and-Agriculture is a linking of essential themes that has been neglected until recent times. It is not new, but a realization of ancient wisdom that has been ignored since the industrial revolution in Europe. With the spread of Western culture to the East, particularly from the twentieth century, a confrontation between Eastern integrated understanding of nature and Western control-of-nature based approaches of agriculture. This confrontation has produced an awareness of the benefits of smallholder agriculture where farmers’ agricultural practices are integrated with their cultural beliefs and practices, usually codified in religion. From this awareness, a revisiting of the underpinnings of Western culture has revealed a neglected understanding of humans as part of nature, as contained in scriptures. In addition, all scriptures use agricultural references to impart their esoteric concepts of transcendence – this occurred with the development of the great religions and writing, both of which relied on agriculture to create stable and stratified civilizations in which agriculture was the everyday preoccupation of the populace. Together these two linkages between religion and agriculture provide the base for an expanding field of research within the general field of agricultural philosophy.