Subsistence Agriculture
Farmers grow and raise a diverse range of crops and livestock for their family’s consumption.
Obtaining enough yield to feed ones family and close community using fewer mechanical resources and more hand labor to care for the crops and livestock
Commercial agriculture
Farmers who grow cops and raise livestock for profit to sell to customers.
Bid-rent Theory
explains the relationships between land value, commercial location, and transportation (primarily in urban areas) using gradient or slope
Intensively
Less land and use it to produce the most agricultural yield per unit of land.
Extensively
More land and use it less
Land surveying
A scientific technique used to determine a property’s 3 dimensional position of points and the distances and angles between them.
Intensive agriculture
Farmers expend a great deal of effort to produce as much yield as possible from an area of land. To achieve high productivity, they rely on high levels of “inputs” and energy.
Intensive subsistence agriculture
this type of farming feeds more than half the people living in densely populated semi-peripheral and peripheral countries.
Intensive commercial agriculture
involves heavy investments in labor and capital and results in high yields for profit-its products are commodities intended for a sale market.
Clustered settlement
most common form, in which residents live in close proximity. Houses and farm buildings are near one another, with farmland and pasture land surrounding the settlement.
Dispersed settlements
Houses and buildings are isolated from one another, and all the homes in a settlement are distributed over a relatively large area.
Linear settlement
Pattern, houses and buildings extend in a long line that usually follows a land feature, such as a riverfront, coast, or hill, aligns along a transportation route.
Monocropping
The cultivation of one or two crops that are rotated seasonally-commonly corn, soybeans, wheat, or cotton.
-is seen in intensive commercial agriculture.
Monoculture
refers to the agricultural system of planting one crop or rising one type of animal annually.
Crop rotation
the varying of crops from year to year to allow for the restoration of valuable nutrients and the continuing productivity of soil.
Plantation agriculture
Involves large-scale commercial farming of one particular crop grown for markets often distant from plantation.
Is one of the oldest forms of intensive commercial agriculture.
Market gardening
Is farming that produces fruits, vegetables, and flowers and typically serves a specific market, or urban area, where farmers can conveniently sell to local grocery stores, restaurants, farmers markets, and road stands.
Mixed crop and livestock systems
In which both crops and livestock are raised for profit.
Shifting cultivation
Is the practice of growing crops or grazing animals on a piece of land for a year or two, then abandoning that land when the nutrients have been depleted from the soil and moving to a new land where the process is repeated.
Slash and Burn
A type of shifting cultivation
to maintain the land. They clear the land by cutting down the trees and brush, and after the vegetation dries, burning this “slash” resulting in nutrient-rich fertilizer.
Pastoral Nomadism (Nomadic Herding)
People who practice this move their animals seasonally or as needed to allow the best grazing.
Transhumance
the movement of herds between pastures at cooler, higher elevations during the summer months and lower elevations during the winter.
Domestication
Is the deliberate effort to grow plants and raise animals, making plants and animals adapt to human demands, and using selective breeding to develop desirable characteristics
Foragers
Small nomadic groups who had primarily plant-based diets and ate small animals or fish for protein.
Agricultural Hearth
Each area where different groups began to domesticate plants and animals.
Columbian Exchange
the exchange of goods and ideas between the Americas, Europe, and Africa
First Agricultural Revolution
The shift from Foraging (or searching for food) to farming
occurred independently in several different hearth across five continents.
Second Agricultural Revolution
Began in Britain and the Low countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) and diffused from those regions.
-saw dramatic improvements in crop yields, innovations like more effective yokes for oxen, and later the replacement of oxen by horses, and fertilizers and field drainage systems advancements.
Enclosure system
Farms owned by individuals, and use of the land was restricted to the owner or tenants who rented the land from the owner.
Jethro Tull
invented the horse-drawn seed drill in England (1701)
Cyrus McCormIck
designed and produced a mechanical reaper in the 1830s.
John Deere
Invented a steel plow in 1838
Third Agricultural Revolution
began in the early 20th century and continues to the present day. It features further mechanization and the development of new technology, changes brought about the scientific and technological advances outside of agriculture.
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO)
can enhance the ability of the new strains to resist disease or drought or to have more nutritional impact or consumer appeal.
Green Revolution
The new crop strains-already in use in the US-were introduced in areas with low yields and large populations, including Mexico, India, and Indonesia.
Global supply chains
Enable the delivery of product between two different countries. For example, consumers in a store in Canada who purchase vegetables that originated from a farm in the Netherlands are each part of the this.
Cash crop
a crop that is produced for its commercial value
Fair trade
This movement is a global campaign to fix unfair wage practices and protect the ability of farmers to earn a living.