What challenges did Sumerian farmers face?

Answer 1

You should probably watch on youtube, assuming its still posted, "Guns, Germs and Steel." While I did not agree completely the host and author of the book of the same name, made a valid argument; all the power a country has, is rooted in its farms. You fly over the United States, and you actually care to pay attention, its pretty frightening; just farms, farms, and more farms, far as the eye can see. Its pretty unreal; before you hear the complaints of some tree hugger about "the vulnerability of top soil" and all that garbage jump on a plane and take the time to look down. Planet earth is not as "frail" as the left makes it out to be; that is just panic mongering as an excuse to raise taxes and extend government regulation. I hardly sympathize with conservatives mind, I only speak of things the way I see them and try to tell it like it is.

Although the truth is 90% of the soil of Mesopotamia (Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Kuwait) and the Arabian peninsula, combined, is in fact fertile, the problem is not the fertility of the soil but water. Believe it or not, the area around Riyadh has farms; again the whole Arabian peninsula is in fact fertile, the problem is not soil fertility but hydration. In "Guns, Germs and Steel" the host/author argues, its not just a civilizations ability to farm, but the relative ease of farming. The easier it is to grow food, the more leisure time you have to make things to massacre the other person. The most prominent world cultures, namely Europe, India, and China, who have all traded places with each other in prominence cycling through history, all three of those places have relative ease with farming. So, how come North America did not become a major power? The short answer is isolation; a culture needs not only to grow food, but it can also NOT be cut off from the flow ideas. Not to say though, most native Americans were not farmers; the truth is the bulk of native Americans from the fertile lands of Canada (below the arctic circle), all the way to Argentina, were in fact farmers, the nomadic warriors of romanticized "cowboys and Indians (native Americans)" stories, were in fact a minority. The lands of the U.S. and Canada have always been farmed where they could be farmed, in fact most of the U.S. qualifies as stolen farmland.

In Mesopotamia, because of irrigation, farm work there, is twice as difficult as most other places, to compound the problem, if an army attacks, destroys everything etc, it is extremely difficult to get the lands back to normal, whereas farm land in North America, Europe, India and China have been known to take a beating. The farm lands of the Americas, Europe, India and China have soaked all kinds of blood, but always, farmers recovered with relative ease. In Mesopotamia screw up a farm operation and that farmer's had it, its part of the reason one empire after the next has easily (relatively easily) marched over the region. The Americas south of the Rio grande have not gained world prominence, largely due to the psychological inferiority complex of the bulk of the population, and the abuses of the upper classes. The truth is, the farm lands of Latin America are actually 10 times more fertile than the ones in the north, problem is, productivity and work ethic are huge issues. Productivity is lacking, because wealthy land owners do not care about the well being of their workers, they don't care that they work them like mules so they won't buy modern farm equipment, given this abuse they work barely enough to survive, largely unmotivated to do so and the bulk of the money always goes to the usually racist land owner. Between lack of both equipment, and motivation, despite the greater fertility of the lands, the U.S. and Canada outproduce Latin America largely due to the fact that farms here are for the most part largely independent operations. In Latin America farms are generally huge; some up to 10,000 acres, owned, often, by one powerful family, the infamous "Hacienda" upper classes.

Again, destroy Mesopotamian farmland and its hell-on-earth getting things back to normal. Its part of the reason every semitic group that has called the area "home" has at one time or another been reduced to a nomadic existence. Again, in Mesopotamian farms, everything is twice the work, this is not even accounting the blistering sun.