The land of Israel is always referred to as a land of 'milk and honey' which suggests fertility, but more specifically, fertile for animal husbandry. I know that the Jewish patriarchs were shepherds, and in Egypt, according to the bible, prior to enslavement, were designated as essentially ranchers. When did the Jews begin to significantly practice farming and did it have a negative/positive effect on the environment?
Did it lead to deforestation? The galil is regarded as heavily forested in the bible, which is not the case today, and Im aware that Mark Twain in his travel diary regarded the land as barren (obviously a very large time scale)
So, when did they start? In what areas? And what were the effects/how immediate were they?
Unfortunately, this is more a question for archeologists than historians. There are no written records fromnthe dawn of agriculture in the southern Levant, which preceded writing by over 5 millenia. We do know that people in the region were farming cereals and pulses and cultivating fig trees over 7,000 years before the emergence of a distinct Israelite material culture.
It's not at all clear, by the way, that the ancestral Israelites were nomadic pastoralists. Yes, that's how they are described in the Hebrew Bible, but it's very difficult to find archeological evidence to prove or disprove this. Nomads tend not to leave an abundance of material remains for future archeologists to excavate. There has been considerable recent debate among archeologists about exactly how sedentary vs nomadic the early Israelites were; and this has even filtered to the non-academic literature.