Horticulture Vs. Agriculture

Many people have a difficult time understanding the differences between horticulture and agriculture. This may occur because some agricultural strategies cross over into horticultural strategies. Linguistically the term agriculture comes from the combination of the Latin words agri (field) and cultura (cultivation). Horticulture comes from the combination of the Latin words hortus (garden) and cultura. Cultivating a field vs. cultivating a garden. We can see the implications of agriculture’s mono-cropping primary succession plant obsession in its very origin. We can also see the implications of horticulture’s diversity of plants and smaller-scale style through its origins.

The real determining factor involves the results of how the strategy affects the land; does it create more biodiversity or less? Does it strengthen the biological community or weaken it? It seems like a good idea to create a list of horticultural and agricultural strategies and reveal how and why you can use them to create more life, or misuse them to create less.
Agriculture uses strategies of cultivation such as transplanting, seeding, tilling, burning, pruning, fertilizing, selective harvesting, crop-rotation, etc. But the main difference between agriculture and horticulture involves agriculture’s focus on using these tools to create one habitat; the meadow or “field.” Horticulture uses the same strategies of cultivation to promote ecological succession and diversity of landscapes. Let’s go through and find out for ourselves.

Catastrophe; Burning Vs. TillingWhen I hear the word “tilling,” the classic image of a farmer and his plow pop into my head. I can see the deep trenches it has cut into the land in pretty rows. I can smell the sweetness of the upturned earth. Tilling works as an artificial catastrophe. Burning also works as a catastrophe but frequent, small-scale burns return nutrients to the soil without killing roots of desired species, eliminates succession and prevents large-scale fires from occurring.

Soil Aeration; Sticks Vs. SteelGophers and moles dig holes and aerate the soil. Even foragers use digging sticks for forage roots, tubers and rhizomes. This breaks up the earth making it easier for the roots to grow as well as aerates the soil. The plow on the other hand, goes too deep and destroys the mycorrhizal network of fungi that distributes nutrients to plants. It also aerates the soil, but it goes too deep and causing the soil to dry too much, which leads to soil loss and erosion.
Irrigation; Sticks Vs. StoneBeavers build small scale dams with sticks that create flood plains, wetlands and marshes that provide habitat for aquatic life. Humans too have replicated this on a small scale. Civilization builds insanely large dams of stone that destroy the rivers life by draining too much water and drying it out.

SeedingAny squirrel will tell you; if you want to ensure that you have more to eat year after year, plant a few more seeds than you’ll dig up to eat during the winter.
TransplantingTransplanting looks the same as seeding to me. Do you consider a seed a plant? What about seeds that germinate into plants and than grow through rhizome? Some willow trees can loose a branch, only to have that branch drift down stream and grow into a whole new plant! Wait, would you consider it new if it came from a pre-existing tree? Do they share the same soul? Have I gone too deep for a chapter about horticulture and agriculture?

Fertilizing; Poop vs. PetrolShit. We all do it. Poop turns into fertilizer. Controlled burns also work as fertilizer by quickly breaking down dead wood and making their nutrients bio-available. Agriculturalists just import nutrients from other areas, and in the case of oil, from under the ground!

PesticidesForagers and horticulturalists also used burning to keep down insect populations. Civilization uses toxic chemicals that poison not only bugs, but the ground, the water, the birds, and our own bodies.

Pruning & Coppicing;Beaver pruning stimulates willows, cottonwood and aspen to regrow bushier the next spring. Black bears break branches. Hunter-gatherers prune trees too, to encourage larder yields and materials for making tools like baskets.

Mono-cropping?Horticulturalists don’t use this technique. It exists uniquely to agriculturalists. Probably the larger symptom of control and domestication. No weeds in my field!

Selective Harvesting; Strength Vs. WeaknessEvery animal uses this technique. Wolves thin out the sick and week deer. Sometimes you take the weak so the strong survive. Sometimes you eat the strong so your poop will fertilize the seed. Selective harvesting shows us that systems evolve to work in cooperation; if we look closely we can see the outcome of our decisions. Domestication also works as a form of selective harvesting, only rather than strengthen the plant or animal it weakens it. I go more into this aspect in Domestication Vs. Rewilding.

Seasonal RotationAside from building strength through selective harvesting, seasonal rotation of lands and food sources, and even yearly rotations allows an area to restore itself from the temporary impacts of the harvest.

Many people also make the assumption that people who practice horticulture long enough eventually begin to practice agriculture. I’d like to suggest the perceived continuum from foraging to agriculture does not exist. I’d like to suggest that a continuum between foragers and horticultural peoples exists, but agriculture appears as a completely different beast. It goes against the fundamental restorative principles that shape the continuum between foraging and horticulture. Therefore, although it uses mostly intensified horticultural practices, it disregards the most basic ecological principles.

Foragers, Hunter-gatherers and Horticulturalists used (and still in some places use today) the methods above to build soil, create varying habitats of succession, creating more ecotones and increasing biodiversity. Agriculture does not do that at all. If a continuum existed, we would see a decrease in biodiversity in each new phase of the continuum. Because we don’t see this, we can guess that agriculture sits outside of that subsistence continuum as a completely different beast all-together.

I would like to note that many people use the term agriculture too loosely. Terms like “sustainable agriculture,” make no sense linguistically and from the word’s origin. We need to remember to differentiate between agriculture (the field/mono-crop) and horticulture (the garden of forest succession) if we want to see how to live sustainably.The next difficult part obviously involves how to translate this knowledge to practical use. The question remains; how can we change our subsistence strategies from agriculturaling-supermarkets to horticulturing/hunting/gathering villages? How can we go from stupid-civilized-urban-dweller to rewilding-horticultural-hunter-gatherer-hot-shot?

What is Horticulture?

The science and art of growing fruit, flowers, ornamental plants, and vegetables in small gardens.HORTICULTURE (Lat. hortus, a garden), the art and science of the cultivation of garden plants, whether for utilitarian or for decorative purposes. The subject naturally divides itself into two sections, which we here propose to treat separately, commencing with the science, and passing on to the practice of the cultivation of flowers, fruits and vegetables as applicable to the home garden. The point of view taken is necessarily, as a rule, that of a British gardener.
Part I.-Principles Or Science Of Horticulture Horticulture, apart from the mechanical details connected with the maintenance of a garden and its appurtenances, may be considered as the application of the principles of plant physiology to the cultivation of plants from all parts of the globe, and from various altitudes, soils and situations. The lessons derived from the abstract principles enunciated by the physiologist, the chemist and the physicist require, however, to be modified to suit the special circumstances of plants under cultivation. The necessity for this modification arises from the fact that such plants are subjected to conditions more or less unnatural to them, and that they are grown for special purposes which are at variance, in degree at any rate, with their natural requirements.
The life of the plant (see Plants) makes itself manifest in the processes of growth, development and reproduction. By growth is here meant mere increase in bulk, and by development the series of gradual modifications by which a plant, originally simple in its structure and conformation, becomes eventually complicated, and endowed with distinct parts or organs. The reproduction of the higher plants takes place either asexually by the formation of buds or organs answering thereto, or sexually by the production of an embryo plant within the seed. The conditions requisite for the growth, development and reproduction of plants are, in general terms, exposure, at the proper time, to suitable amounts of light, heat and moisture, and a due supply of appropriate food. The various amounts of these needed in different cases have to be adjusted by the gardener, according to the nature of the plant, its " habit" or general mode of growth in its native country, and the influence to which it is there subjected, as also in accordance with the purposes for which it is to be cultivated, &c. It is but rarely that direct information on all these points can be obtained; but inference from previous experience, especially with regard to allied forms, will go far to supply such deficiencies. Moreover, it must be remembered that the conditions most favourable to plants are not always those to which they are subjected in nature, for, owing to the competition of other forms in the struggle for existence, liability to injury from insects, and other adverse circumstances, plants may actually be excluded from the localities best suited for their development. The gardener therefore may, and does, by modifying, improve upon the conditions under which a plant naturally exists. Thus it frequently happens that in our gardens flowers have a beauty and a fragrance, and fruits a size and savour denied to them in their native haunts. It behooves the judicious gardener, then, not to be too slavish in his attempts to imitate natural conditions, and to bear in mind that such attempts sometimes end in failure. The most successful gardening is that which turns to the best account the plastic organization of the plant, and enables it to develop and multiply as perfectly as possible. Experience, coupled with observation and reflection, as well as the more indirect teachings of tradition, are therefore of primary importance to the practical gardener.
We propose hereto notice briefly the several parts of a flowering plant, and to point out the rationale of the cultural procedures connected with them (see the references to separate articles at the end of article on Botany).