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: