For more than two thousand years, Ethiopia's ox-plow agricultural
system was the most efficient and innovative in Africa, but has
been afflicted in the recent past by a series of crises: famine,
declining productivity, and losses in biodiversity. James C. McCann
analyzes the last two hundred years of agricultural history in
Ethiopia to determine whether the ox-plow agricultural system has
adapted to population growth, new crops, and the challenges of a
modern political economy based in urban centers. This agricultural
history is set in the context of the larger environmental and
landscape history of Ethiopia, showing how farmers have integrated
crops, tools, and labor with natural cycles of rainfall and soil
fertility, as well as with the social vagaries of changing
political systems. McCann traces characteristic features of
Ethiopian farming, such as the single-tine scratch plow, which has
retained a remarkably consistent design over two millennia, and a
crop repertoire that is among the most genetically diverse in the
world. People of the Plow provides detailed documentation of
Ethiopian agricultural practices since the early nineteenth century
by examining travel narratives, early agricultural surveys,
photographs and engravings, modern farming systems research, and
the testimony of farmers themselves, collected during McCann's five
years of fieldwork. He then traces the ways those practices have
evolved in the twentieth century in response to population growth,
urban markets, and the presence of new technologies.
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