Chapter 12 Vocab

Agriculture

The cultivation of plants and animals, as well as forestry for food and non-food items.

Climate Regions

A system of classification which sorts the world's climates into categories and allows for better understanding of agricultural needs in the area.

Mediterranean Agriculture

Crops such as olives, grapes, citrus fruits, and grains that use very little water.

Subsistence Agriculture

When the people growing the food are primarily the ones eating the food.

Commercial agriculture

When the people growing the food are more often selling the food.

Bid-Rent Theory

A theory explaining the prices of real estate based on their distance to a central business district.

Central Business District

The commercial, economic, and social center of a city.

Intensive Agriculture

A farming practice in which the land is maximized using tools, high-powered technology, labor, fertilizers, and pesticides.

Clustered Settlements

When people live in certain areas at high volumes and other areas with low volume.

Dispersed Settlement

When people are spread across the land.

Linear Settlement

When people settle in an elongated area across a common communication channel (like a river).

Monocropping

Growing a single crop over a large amount of land.

Monoculture

The cultivation of a single crop over a large amount of land.

Crop Rotation

Planting a different crop on the same land, over the course of seasons.

Plantation Agriculture

When a single crop is grown over a large amount of land and led by humans and animals.

Market Garden

Small scale gardening that is sold directly to customers such as 'cash crops'.

Mixed Crop and Livestock Systems

An agricultural system where animals and plants are grown together on the same land.

Extensive Agriculture

Farming practices that occur in a large amount of land with a low amount of people.

Shifting Cultivation

When the frame of reference for farming is moved every once in a while, allowing for vegetation to grow freely in the former plot of land.

Slash and Burn Agriculture

A type of agriculture that involves cutting and burning away plants in the area that will be used.

Nomadic Herding

In which livestock are guided on a pasture in which to graze.

Transhumance

When nomadic tribes move from the highlands to the lowlands seasonally in order to feed their livestock.

Domestication

The process of taming an animal to keep as a pet or on a farm.

Foragers

People who look for food rather than cultivating it.

Agricultural Hearth

An area where the ideas and theories behind agriculture began to spread.

Fertile crescent

The crescent in the middle-east where agriculture began to spread from.

Columbian Exchange

When Christopher Columbus came and spread a bunch of European diseases to people in South America.

First Agricultural Revolution

When people began farming twelve thousand years ago.

Second Agricultural Revolution

Advances in technology led to increases in crop and livestock production.

Enclosure System

A post second agricultural revolution system that led to land being owned by specific people rather than all land being owned by all people.

Third Agricultural Revolution

In the 1940s, improvements in plant breeds and agrochemicals led to a boom in agriculture and improved world hunger.

GMOS

Genetically modified organisms that are tweaked to improve certain traits of a plant.

Green Revolution

A great increase in food grains.