Some of the earliest food producing activities were probably closely connected with the utilization of the rivers and springs. Some of the springs in the Kermanshah region probably irrigated large areas. Ghanats or underground channels or galleries as a source of irrigation have apparently been used for a long time. It seems that, in general, climate, topography and the fact that wheat and barley are essential and form a major part of the diet of the peasants, have greatly influenced agricultural practices. Most of the earlier attempts at cultivation were made in the foothills and the less sloping parts of the uplands, where wheat or barley was the surest crop. Many of the stream valleys probably were not inhabited during ancient times because of malaria and other diseases. Some of the valleys were under irrigation mainly for growing vegetables and fruits.
Some form of agriculture has been practiced in Iran for many centuries and even thousands of years. There has been a historical transition from man as a food collector to man as a food producer. Early efforts, of course, were concentrated on livestock raising and probably only small plots were used for growing subsistence crops. Evidence is accumulating that at least part of this transition took place during the early Persian civilization, and in the fertile crescent of the Middle East, about 6 000 to 8 000 years ago.
In more modern times, before 1962, half the cultivable land of the country was in the hands of great land lords (khans) and was considered to be private property (melk). The domains of these landowners could be vast, extending to 20, 30 or 40 villages. Many villagers, especially those who cultivated the land, were serfs (roaya). Besides the vast holdings of the great landowners, some 20 percent of the cultivable land was owned by people of more modest means (the khordehmalekin), who nonetheless would have cultivators working for them on their smallholdings. The remainder of the cultivable land was held in a kind of fiduciary ownership, either in ways that resembled a private trust (vaghf-e khass) or for religious and public purposes (vaghf-e amm). The cultivators of arable land (nasagh) lived in rural settlements, together with landless people (khoshneshin), who would be artisans, traders, workers of various kinds and unemployed or unemployable people. The patterns of land ownership in Iran, and its associated social problems, necessitated a nationwide land reform to liberate the farmers from the bondage of serfdom.
An important change in the agricultural structure of Iran occurred after the passing of a land reform law in 1962. This limited the size of private holdings to 20 ha of irrigated land. As a result, large areas were distributed to landless labourers. In 1976, the bulk of the rural population, more than 60 percent, dwelt on smallholdings of less than 10 ha, but their contribution was no more than 20 percent of the marketed output of the agricultural sector of the economy. Tens of thousands of rural villagers, cultivators and wage earners were freed from exploitation by landlords or their middlemen, but they continued to be constrained in other ways. Many small landowners even experienced a decline in real income as their holdings diminished in size. Administrative and political difficulties, particularly the lack of managerial experience, limited the overall success of the scheme in terms of agricultural production.
The 1979 Islamic Revolution brought with it new social and structural forces that further transformed the agrarian structure. The most spectacular change in the modes of agricultural production after the 1979 revolution was the establishment of mosha (collective ownership) cooperatives. In the private sector, on the other hand, the fall of many big agricultural enterprises coincided with the maintenance of the middle sector, the preservation of large state-owned farms, the incorporation of large private farms into the public sector, semi-public farm corporations and the dissolution of production cooperatives. Most of the small-scale production units belong to independent peasants. Independent peasant production units are the basis of agricultural production in most parts of Iran (Dewan and Famouri, 1964; Balali et al., 2003).
