Agriculture

Subsistence Farming

farmers produce enough for themselves and their families and do not enter the cash economy at all
- small and diverse
- for household and local
- communal and private land
- low inputs and low vertical intergration
- infrequent contract farming
- low output sold
- diffuculty escaping poverty
- more common in the southern hemisphere
  Commericial Faming
- large and specialized
- for national and international consumption
- private and corporate land
- high purchase input and vertical intergration
- majority of all output sold

our world in data observations: Much of Africa still has a high labor force in agriculture. China has a really high farm machinery per unit of land. Niger has the highest share of GDP form agriculture.

Shifting cultivation

“slash and burn” or “Swidden”
shifting fields to find better land
practiced in tropical and subtropical areas
cycle
- Clear Plots of vegetation
- plant crops
- loss of fertility
  - loss of decaying vegetation
  - leaching of nutrients
- abandon plot and begin on a new one

Pastoralism

livestock graze on open land
sedentary, nomadic, or semi-nomadic in nautre
cattle, camels. yaks, goats, llamas, horses, reindeer, and sheep

Transhumance

semi-nomadic style of pastoralism where the farmers seasonallymove livestock from high altitude pastures in the winter

Wet Rice farming

paddy= rice field
terrace farming in china, vietnam and myanmar
water intensive that is vulnearble to drought and flooding

Smallholder crop and livestock farming

relies on rainfall rather than irrigation
type of subsistence farming
diverse range of crops
excess sold at market

Intensive vs. Extensive agriculture

intensive - lots of labor and investment relative to the size of the landholding
- complex irrigation, crop rotation, pesticides and GMO
- most of large scale commerical agriculture functions
Extensive - less labor and little investmenet in material relative to the size of the land used

Revolutoons of Agriculture

1st agricultural revolution/neolithic revolution:
- started 12K years ago
- different time in different parts of the world
- radically changed humans relationship to food and nature
2nd Agricultural Revolution/ British Agricultural Revolution
- same time as the industrial revolution (1750-1850)
- proved Thomas Malthus wrong
- movement beyond subsistence
- Great Britain — enclosure acts
  - wealthy british lords limited peoples access to fields
  - new tech: seed drill, cotton gin, steel plow, mechanical reaper
3rd Agricultural Revolution/Green revolution
- second half of the 20th century improved crop genetics, pesticides and fertilizers that led to greater yields worldwide
- tractors, irrigation and crop fertilizer
- Norman Bourlag in 1940s
  - American Midwest
  - invention of high-yield grains — rice
- Organic agriculture — non-GMO
- Sustainable Agriculture — no-til farms, strip cropping, to prevent erosion
- Precision Agriculture — using technology to treat specific plants with pesticides and fertilizers rather than blanket spreading
Gene Revolution
- development of GMOs
- GURT (genetic use restriction techonology) - making crops infertile
- terminator seeds/suicide seeds

Crop rotation

develped during the middle ages
restore nutrients and nitrogen
annual rotation of crops
small grain crop→root crop→small grain crop→ legume

Commercial agriculture

mediterranean agriculture
- near the sea, theres plenty of moisture and moderate winters, but lots of hillsides
- horticulture — growing flowers, fruits and vegetables: olives and grapes
- California — citrus and tree nuts
truck farming/ commercial market gardening
- growing fruits and vegetables for commericial sale
- they can be taken fresh to market or for canning and freezing
- crops that grow well in one location in large quantities for the marketplace and shipment
plantation agriculture
- large commercial famrs in less developed countries
- large quantities of one crop for export
- many cash crops and commodities grown this way
- cotton, coffee, rubber, tobacco, sugarcane, cacao, tea, bananas and others
- primary driver of the trans-atlantic slave to the US, brazil and the caribbean during the 18th and 19th century
Commercial livestock farming
- commercial dairy farming — dairy spoils easily so producers need to be close to the consumer
  - milksheds — region producing milk for a specific country
  - ranching — animals graze over an extensive area, usually to be processed as meat
  - dry-lot dairies — A fenced in areas that are free of vegetation and is used for the containment, feeding and fattening of livestock — factory farms
Cadastral survey — a systematic documentation of property ownership, shape, use, and boundaries
- metes and bounds
  - english system that was based to the colonies
  - not used recently
  - most of east coast — colonies
  - also used for voting districts
  - creates irregular property shapes
  - landmarks are used as starting points to delineate boundaries, and then straight lines are drawn from one point to another
- township and range — only US
  - squares inside of squares
  - land ordinance of 1785 established the system west of the appalachains — ignored indigenous
  - Thomas Jefferson
  - Longitude and Latitiude determined squares
- French long lots
  - divide up land based on access to water for irrigation
  - used in places where farms needed to access the waterway
  - found in french and spanish settlements