Agricultural Land-Use Patterns and Processes Detailed Study Notes

Unit 5: Agriculture and Rural Land-Use Patterns and Processes

• About 12,000 years ago, agriculture began in Southwest Asia and later diffused globally.

• Four agricultural revolutions have propelled agriculture and societies forward.

• Since 1750, mechanization, chemicals, and research have dramatically increased agricultural productivity.

• Advancements have allowed more people to work outside of agriculture, but have also increased stress on the environment.

Physical Geography, Economics, and Settlement Patterns

• Climate, soils, and landforms shape what people grow and raise.

• Market proximity influences agricultural goods production.

• Farmers have shaped the landscape (deforestation, wetland drainage).

• Technology improvements have shifted agriculture towards larger enterprises and greater interdependence.

Changes and Opportunities

• Changes in technology and society influence food production and consumption.

• Historically, women were responsible for cooking, but this has shifted as more women enter the workforce.

Enduring Understandings:

1. Resource availability and cultural practices influence agricultural practices and land-use patterns. (PS0-5)

2. Agriculture has changed over time due to cultural diffusion and advances in technology. (SPS-5)

3. Agricultural production and consumption patterns vary, presenting different opportunities and challenges. (IMP-5)

Chapter 11: Origins, Patterns, and Settlements of Agriculture (Topics 5.7-5.3)

• Topic 5.1: Introduction to Agriculture

  • Learning Objective: Explain the connection between physical geography and agricultural practices. (PS0-5.A)

• Topic 5.2: Settlement Patterns and Survey Methods

  • Learning Objective: Identify different rural settlement patterns and methods of surveying rural settlements. (PS0-5.B)

• Topic 5.3: Agricultural Origins and Diffusions

  • Learning Objectives:

    • Identify major centers of domestication of plants and animals. (SPS-5.A)

    • Explain how plants and animals diffuse globally (SPS-5.B)

5.1 Introduction to Agriculture

• Essential Question: What is the connection between physical geography and agricultural practices?

• Agriculture involves humans altering the landscape to raise crops and livestock for consumption and trade.

• Physical geography (soil types, landforms) and climate (long-term weather patterns) shape agriculture.

  • Example: Coffee grows best on hillsides in warm climates.

  • Example: Olives, grapes, and figs thrive near the Mediterranean Sea.

• Economic factors (consumer demand) also impact agriculture.

Physical Geography and Agriculture

• Water access is crucial for animals and crops.

• Soil nutrient levels influence what can be grown.

  • Example: Cotton needs nutrient-rich soil; sorghum can grow in nutrient-poor soils.

• Flat land in large valleys is excellent for agriculture, while rugged land requires more labor.

• Humans alter the environment through:

  • Irrigation

  • Terrace farming

  • Deforestation

  • Desertification

  • Drainage of wetlands

Climate and Agriculture

• Environmental and economic factors influence agriculture by determining the types of crops and animals.

• Extreme climates (high latitudes/elevations, extreme precipitation) have low population density.

• Technology can overcome climatic obstacles.

  • Example: Greenhouses in Iceland and Greenland.

• Climate and cultural traits (food preferences) shape agricultural activity.

  • Example: Religious objections to eating hogs in Southwest Asia.

Economic Factors and Agriculture

• Subsistence Agriculture

  • Goal is to grow enough food/raise enough livestock for the farmer's family, with a secondary goal to sell or trade any surplus.

  • Common in less-developed regions with small farms (under two acres).

  • Limited land and expense of advanced technologies make it difficult to grow excess food to sell or trade.

• Commercial Agriculture

  • Goal is to grow enough crops/raise enough livestock to sell for profit.

  • More common in developed countries, increasingly common in semi-periphery countries.

  • Farmers use profits to purchase more land, equipment, technology, or training.

Intensive and Extensive Farming Practices

• Agriculture depends on resources used to grow crops or raise animals.

• Intensive agriculture uses large amounts of inputs (energy, fertilizers, labor, machines) to maximize yields.

• Extensive agriculture uses fewer inputs and results in less yields.

Intensive Commercial Agriculture

• Heavy investments in labor and capital (money invested in land, equipment, machines).

• Results in high yields and profits.

• Almost always capital intensive, but can also be labor intensive.

• Examples: Market gardening, plantations, large-scale mixed crop and livestock systems.

Intensive Subsistent Agriculture

• Often labor and animal intensive.

• Example: Rice paddies in Southeast Asia, where farming is performed with low-paid human labor.

Extensive Commercial Agriculture

• Low inputs of resources with the goal of selling the product for profit.

• Ranching is the most common example (western United States and Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia).

• Typically requires extremely low human labor.

Extensive Subsistent Agriculture

• Uses few inputs and is practiced in areas with climatic extremes (tropical, semi-arid, or arid regions).

• Examples: Nomadic herding and shifting cultivation.

Agricultural Practices and Regions

• Influenced by level of development, climate, and purpose of the product.

• Derwent Whittlesey identified eleven main agricultural regions in 1936.

Agricultural Regions

• Pastoral Nomadism

  • Climate: Drylands

  • Locations: Southwest, Central, and East Asia; North Africa

• Shifting Cultivation

  • Climate: Tropical

  • Locations: Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia

• Plantation

  • Climate: Tropical/Sub-Tropical

  • Locations: Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia

• Mixed Crop and Livestock

  • Climate: Cold and Warm Mid-Latitude

  • Locations: Midwest United States and Canada, Central Europe

• Grain

  • Climate: Cold Mid-Latitude

  • Locations: North Central United States, South Central Canada, East Europe

• Commercial Gardening

  • Climate: Warm Mid-Latitude

  • Locations: Southeast United States, Southeast Australia

• Dairy

  • Climate: Cold and Warm Mid-Latitude

  • Locations: Northeast United States, Southeast Canada, Northwest Europe

• Mediterranean

  • Climate: Warm Mid-Latitude

  • Locations: Southern coast of Europe, Northern coast of Africa, Pacific coast of the United States

• Livestock Ranching

  • Climate: Drylands

  • Locations: Western North America, Southeast South America, Central Asia, Southern Africa

• Intensive Subsistence

  • Climate: Warm Mid-Latitude

  • Locations: South, Southeast, and East Asia; Near large populations

Pastoral Nomadism

• Subsistent extensive agriculture in arid/semi-arid climates.

• Nomads rely on animals (cattle, camels, reindeer, goats, yaks, sheep, horses) for survival.

• Move herds to different pastures, often trading meat for crops.

• Animals vary by region:

  • South Central Asia and East Africa: Cattle (hot climate)

  • Middle East: Camels (survive without water)

  • Siberia: Reindeer (cold weather)

Shifting Cultivation

• Subsistent extensive farming where farmers grow crops on land for a year or two, then move to another field when the soil loses fertility.

• Slash-and-burn agriculture (swidden agriculture) clears land by burning vegetation, enriching nutrient-poor soil with nitrogen.

• Farmers plant and harvest crops until the soil becomes less fertile, then move to another area.

• Examples: Rice in Southeast Asia, maize in South America, millet and sorghum in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Communities/villages often own the land.

• Not sustainable as population increases and land becomes scarce due to nutrient depletion.

Plantation Agriculture

• Commercial agriculture replaced subsistence farming under colonialism.

• Plantations are large commercial farms specializing in one crop.

• Found in low latitudes with hot, humid climates and substantial rainfall.

• Labor intensive, often exploiting low-wage labor.

• Processing occurs near the plantation to reduce the cost of moving bulky crops.

• Crops include coffee, cocoa, rubber, sugarcane, bananas, tobacco, tea, and cotton.

• As labor costs rise, plantations become more capital intensive.

Mixed Crop and Livestock Farming

• Intensive commercial integrated system with interdependence between crops and animals.

• Grains are grown to feed livestock (cattle for slaughter or dairy cows).

• Animal manure fertilizes the crops.

• Common in developed regions (Canada, Midwestern United States, northern Europe) and diffused to parts of the developing world.

• U.S. farmers grow corn and soybeans for animal feed or various products.

Grain Farming

• Farmers raise wheat in regions too dry for mixed crop agriculture.

• Wheat is consumed mostly by people and produced in prairies and plains.

• Top producers: China, India, Russia, and the United States.

• Types of wheat:

  • Spring wheat: Planted in early spring, harvested in early autumn (Canada, Montana, Dakotas).

  • Winter wheat: Planted in the fall, harvested in early summer (Kansas, Oklahoma, Europe).

Commercial Gardening

• Large-scale commercial vegetable gardens and fruit farms (California, Arizona, and states of the Southeast).

• Fruits and vegetables include lettuce, broccoli, apples, oranges, and tomatoes.

• Imports from Mexico and Chile in the winter.

• Also referred to as truck farming because products were traditionally driven to local urban markets and sold.

• Refrigerated trucks allow farmers to sell to distant markets.

• Small-scale market gardening is making a resurgence near cities with buy-local food movements where fruits and vegetables are grown near an urban market and sold to local suppliers, stores, restaurants.

• Market gardening is intensive and requires capital investments of greenhouses and fertilizers.

Dairy Farming

• Traditionally, local farms supplied products to customers in a small geographic area, but improvements in refrigeration and transportation expanded the milk shed, the geographic distance that milk is delivered.

• Large corporate dairy operations replaced smaller family-owned farms, which resulted in fewer farms but more production.

• Most commercial dairy farms are near urban centers and transportation corridors.

• Demand increased faster than pressure for consolidation in Argentina and Brazil, increasing the number of dairy farms.

Mediterranean Agriculture

• Practiced in regions with hot, dry summers, mild winters, narrow valleys, and often some irrigation (southern Europe, northern Africa, southwestern Africa, southwestern Asia, southwestern Australia, California, and central Chile).

• Crops include figs, dates, olives, and grapes.

• Herders practice transhumance (seasonal herding of animals from higher elevations in the summer to lower elevations/valleys in the winter).

• Goats and sheep are the principal livestock due to rugged terrain.

Livestock Ranching

• Commercial grazing of animals confined to a specific area.

• Found in areas too dry to grow crops in large quantities (western United States; the pampas of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay; parts of Spain and Portugal; China; and central Australia).

5.2 Settlement Patterns and Survey Methods

• Essential Question: What are rural settlement patterns and methods of surveying rural settlements?

• Population density is less in rural than urban regions, but human interaction with the environment is significant.

• Technology has changed settlement patterns.

Rural Settlement Patterns

• Clustered (nucleated) settlements

  • Homes located near each other in a village.

  • Fostered sense of place with shared services such as schools.

  • Villagers raised crops and animals in nearby fields and pastures.

  • Soil types, climate, and labor influenced crops.

• Dispersed settlements

  • Farmers lived in homes spread throughout the countryside.

  • Promoted westward expansion in Canada and the United States by giving farmers land (usually 160 acres) if they agreed to live on it for several years.

  • Farmers lived near their fields.

  • Rare in North America

  • Occur in other locations/areas that have rugged or challenging environments, such as with limited water or poor soils.

  • Encourage self-sufficiency but make shared services (schools/defense) difficult.

• Linear settlement

  • Buildings and human activities organized close to a body of water or along a transportation route.

  • Common along rivers before industrialization because of the need for fresh water to irrigate crops.

  • Desire to be close to a transportation route is important today.

  • Small communities sprawl along railroad tracks/metropolitan cities have multiple entry/exit points from interstate highways.

Agricultural Practices Impact Land-Use Patterns

• Rural land use evolved as agricultural practices changed due to new technology.

• Mechanical reaper (1831) reduced the need for human labor.

• Crop rotation improved crop yields and food variety.

• British enclosure movement divided common land into individual plots, increasing farm size and production.

• Green Revolution allowed agriculture in regions previously thought incapable of producing food.

• As agriculture became more commercialized, family farms struggled to compete with large corporate farms.

• Changes impacted the size, scope, and organization of land-use patterns.

Establishing Property Boundaries

• Metes and bounds system:

  • Fields in England often had irregular shapes.

  • Metes: Short distances using features of specific points.

  • Bounds: Larger areas based on streams or roads.

• Public Land Survey System (township and range system):

  • Used in the United States beginning in 1785.

  • Surveying measures and records distance, elevation, and size.

  • Rectangular plots of consistent size.

  • Townships: Areas six miles long and six miles wide.

  • Sections: Each square mile (640 acres), divided into smaller lots.

• French long-lot system:

  • Farms were long, thin sections of land perpendicular to a river.

  • Emphasized access to a river for water and trade.

  • Examples in Quebec and Louisiana.

5.3 Agricultural Origins and Diffusions

• Essential Question: What are major centers of domestication of plants and animals and how have plants and animals diffused globally?

• Learning to grow crops allowed humans time to develop nonagricultural technologies.

• Agricultural development was a gateway to other advances.

Centers of Plant and Animal Domestication

• First (Neolithic) Agricultural Revolution

  • Origin of farming marked by the domestication of plants and animals.

  • Subsistence farming: Farmers consumed the crops they raised using simple tools and manual labor.

  • Began in five centers/hearths: Southwest Asia, East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Agricultural Hearths

• Carl Sauer argued that people in various times and locations developed agricultural hearths independently.

• First hearths were in areas with high biodiversity on the edge of forests.

• Characteristics: