This paper aspires to break new grounds by examining Yoruba indigenous knowledge and practices in cultivating local food crops. With the adoption of techniques and technologies that are appropriate to local ecology, soil fertility, plant health, pests, diseases, draught and climate change. Apart from agricultural agro-forestry production systems, the Yoruba post-harvest and handling system administrates their sophistication in storage matters and waste management. The stakeholders have access to information, techniques and technologies through the formal and the esoteric channels. It will be interesting to know how the indigenous institutions enforce rules and norms governing property rights (when violated) and for responding to crises promptly. The paper is based on oral data collected from Yoruba farmers, detailing their experiences, customary practices, proverbs pertaining to all suspects of agriculture, soil fertility, planting and harvest seasons and the deities associated with economic activities. The prayer summarises a history of production, the dynamics of economic, social and political change, the production processes and production relations. African agricultural history has been characterized by broad generalizations, imprecise comparisons unwarranted evolutionism and unsubstantiated assertions. Contrary to the racist and anthropological interpretations of African agricultural history, whole societies were not ‘shift cultivators’, ‘hunter-gatherers’ or ‘pastoralists’. Even though African farmers used hoes, they were not poor. Shifting cultivation was not backward, but progressive.

The Yoruba, like other Africans have diversified patterns of land use and the agricultural techniques and technologies in each locality and in their ecological and socio-economic context. The Yoruba farmers faced (and still face) environmental difficulties and adopted some means of overcoming them i.e. application of indigenous fertilizers to barren lands and rainmaking to combat draught. Essentially, the Yoruba from the pre-colonial periodhad grasped the implications of relationships between agricultural technology and environmental conditions. Logically, the learnt to innovate and adapt new techniques and technologies to their environment. They were not ‘subsistence’ cultivators but peasants who produced primarily for the market long before the arrival of colonial powers. Hence, colonialism did not create African peasantry except predatory Western capitalism into which Africa was integrated by military conquest. This peasant agriculture and diversities of peasant social solidarities and relations. It was dynamic and not static. It was subject to the norms of indigenous institutions, astonishing large-scale diversity in production systems and profound presence of dynamic processes of gender differentiation in the agricultural labour processes. The emerging picture no doubt is at cross-purposes with the received grand theory that ignored the sensitivity of peasants to generation of scientific and technological innovations.