It required in-depth knowledge of the natural environment in which it was carried out: of the relief and the soil characteristics of the land, of the climate, the seasons and, in short, of the seasonal cycles, of water availability, as well as of all aspects of each crop, from preparing the land and sowing the crop to harvesting and its storage in ideal conditions.
Este conocimiento no formaba un corpus rígidoThat knowledge was not a rigid, sino but rather a permeablebody of expertise, ya que quien cultivaba la tierra siempre estaba abierto a probar nuevas semillas e incluso técnicasas the person who cultivated the land was always open to trying new seeds and even techniques, pero desde el empirismo que suponía la comprobación de que funcionasenbut from empiricism that meant checking that it worked. A pesar del desprecio con el que se ha contemplado desde la sociedad modernaDespite the disdain shown by modern society, este conocimiento tenía un cierto carácter científico pues se basaba en la técnica de prueba y that knowledge was scientific to a certain extent as it was based on the technique of trial and error. Además era de naturaleza acumulativaFurthermore, ya que los conocimientos experimentados por cada generación se agregaban al corpus recibido y se transferían a la siguiente generaciónit was accumulative as the knowledge gained by each generation was added to the received expertise and passed on to the following one. Gracias a este conocimiento acumulado cada familia sabía además cuáles eran las mejores tierras de las que disponía para cada tipo de cultivoThanks to this accumulated knowledge, each family also knew which part of its land was best for each type of crop.
[[File:8.5_Recolte_des_betteraves_fin_du_XIXe_siecle._Huile_d’Emile_Claus.png|frame|Récolte des betteraves, fin du XIXe siècle. Huile d’Émile Claus. Fuente: ''Émile Claus'' (1849-1924). Paris: Bibliothèque de l Image, 2013, p. 35.]]