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

Key Concepts:

• Primary economy: timber, fisheries, and mineral and energy resources
• Agricultural activity can be classified by how concentrated the labor and area of activity is for a particular type of farming:
  • Intensive agriculture: requires lots of labor input, or is focused on a small plot of land, or both
  • Extensive agriculture: requires limited labor input, or is spread across large areas of land, or both
• Hunting and gathering societies are the earliest forms of agriculture
• Transhumance: where groups move seasonally not only to avoid harsh climates, climates, but also to follow animal herds and walk to areas where native plants were in fruit
• Animal hunting eventually led to the live capture and eventual domestication of cattle, horses, pigs, donkeys, sheep, goats, reindeer, llamas, alpacas, and water buffaloes
• Pastoralism: agriculture based on the seasonal movement of animals from winter to summer pastures and back again
• Nomadic herding: a practice where whole communities would drive their herds from one seasonal grazing area to another following an annual cycle that was repeated over centuries
• Ranching: grazing livestock in a single large area,
• People learned to domesticate and grow more abundant plants, which led to more permanent and organized farm settlements
  • Other plant cultivars were added to these early farms so that there were a variety of crops
• Multi-cropping if one crop failed or was damaged by pests, another crop would provide a backup food supply
  • More secure than single-crop monoculture
• Monoculture became common in the era of early political civilization and empires, when farms produced a staple crop in large order to feed whole societies and armies
• Mixed farming, or general farming: where multiple crops and animals exist on a single farm to provide diverse nutritional intake and non-food items, such as bone for tools and leather for different materials such as saddles, rope, and coats
• Subsistence agriculture: intensive mixed farming that provides for all of the food and material needs of a household
  • All the daily needs of the household could be provided for on the farm, allowing people to settle permanently and subsist without having to migrate seasonally
• Extensive subsistence agriculture: occurs when there are low amounts of labor inputs per unit of land
  • More likely to occur in less-populated regions or in less-habitable areas where pastoralism is common
  • Today, most subsistence agriculture is usually very intensive and done on small plots of land
• Physiologic density: the number of people per unit of arable land
  • Very high in third world countries compared to first world countries
  • Many rural communities much more susceptible to famine from drought or armed conflicts
• Food preservation: a necessity for survival for thousands of years via drying, pickling, cooking, and storage jars that has led to many cultural variations in food consumption
  • Many specialized crops were grown for both immediate consumption and preservation as a result
  • (EX: cabbages spiced with red pepper and soaked in vinegar were buried in clay storage jars to make kimchi in Korea eight thousand years ago)
• Cash-cropping: a form of extensive agriculture in which harvested crops are exchanged for currency, goods, or credit
  • The credit is then used to buy equipment or seed for the next planting season and in part to buy food, clothing, and other necessities for the farm family t
  • The commercial crops are transported, sold at other markets, and finally preserved or processed into other goods for sale

Communism and Agriculture

• Farming under communism was also done on a non-subsistence basis, with much of the food grown being produced collectively in farm communities and distributed across the country
• In the late 1800s, armed with knowledge of The Communist Manifesto, peasants staged uprisings in Eastern Europe that called for a rejection of not only aristocracy and landlords, but also the whole capitalist system.
• The Russian Revolution in 1917 had a number of political and military causes combined with a crisis of poverty in many rural Russian farming communities.
• The solution was a collectivization of farms and elimination of privately owned land
  • The communes that resulted were large farms where several families were organized as labor units
  • Were assigned quotas by the government that detailed exactly how much each farm should produce each year
  • There were no incentives to produce over the quota or produce other crops or products outside the mandated crop, which usually encouraged monoculture
  • The land was owned collectively by the whole state
  • Over time, farming communes began to produce crop yields similar to those in capitalist economies
  • Result: a system that had no surplus food and not much variety available to consumers

Human Ecology

• Human ecology: human interactions with nature
• Human-environment interactions is more commonly used to describe forestry techniques, fisheries, and environmental regulation in addition to farming practices
• Our ecological relationship to the land is a food web in which each type of crop and animal is dependent on a number of human inputs, soil and climate conditions, and other crops
• Food chain: the order of predators in the animal world that is used to describe several integrated human and mechanical inputs, from developing seeds to planting, fertilizing, harvesting, processing, packaging, and transporting food to market and finally to your dinner plate

Farming Practices

• Crop rotation: occurs when one crop is planted on a plot of land and then switched to another plot in subsequent years
  • The rotation cycle will vary back and forth due to one or more factors
• Multi-cropping: the planting of more than one crop on the same plot of land
  • An intensive strategy in which either crops are planted together simultaneously or one crop is planted right after another in the same row
  • (EX: after summer vegetables are harvested, winter vegetables like kale and spinach can be planted and harvested before the cold)
• Double cropping: planting two crops one after another on a single plot in a year
• Triple cropping: planting three crops in the same year
  • These practices often rely on fertilizers and irrigation
• Each crop has its own growing season, but the general rule is to plant in spring, grow in summer, and harvest in fall
  • (EX: Spring wheat is planted in the spring and harvested in late summer. Winter wheat is planted in the fall, lies dormant in the winter, and then grows in the spring to be harvested by the start of summer.)
• Irrigation: opens up more land to cultivation than would normally be possible in arid climates and is responsible for close to three-quarters of world freshwater use and up to 90 percent of freshwater use in the most poverty-stricken countries of the world
  • Governments heavily subsidize irrigation agriculture with the result that the crops produced are often worth less than the water
• Aquifers: underground water tables that gives water to irrigation farms
  • Depleting at a rapid rate in large-scale grain-producing countries
• Farming practices can be criticized for their dependence on external inputs such as fuel and agricultural chemicals and the effects of farming on soil erosion and local water usage
• Conservation: the practice of preserving and carefully managing the environment and its natural resources
• Conservation agriculture: an increasingly important way of providing a sustainable farming system without sacrificing crop production

Methods:

• No-tillage: involves not plowing the soil so that soil erosion is greatly reduced and soil fertility is increased by retaining natural vegetation
• Crop rotation is used to increase soil fertility and discourage pests
• Inter-planting: planting fast-growing crops alongside slow-growing crops, allowing a farmer to harvest the fast-growing crop before the slow-growing crop shades it out
• Sustainable yield: the amount of crops or animals that can be raised without endangering local resources such as soil, irrigation, or groundwater, or what can be raised without too many expensive inputs that would make farming unprofitable
  • By reducing inputs and using ecologically sound methods, farmers can reduce the risk that their farming practices may lead to long-term environmental or economic problems

Non-Food Crops

• A number of crops are raised for industrial use, textiles (clothing), or animal feed
• Alternative energy crops have become important as oil prices have increased over time
  • (EX: corn has been used to make ethanol, an alcohol that can supplement gasoline and make it burn cleaner)

Shifting Cultivation

• In some third world countries, farming occurs in environmentally sensitive areas such as tropical rainforest or dry grasslands.
• Slash and burn agriculture: occurred in tropical rainforest regions with farmers shifting from one plot of land to another every few years as soil nutrients become depleted
• Abandoned land would fallow and natural vegetation would return, increasing the nutrient biomass of the area
• Rainforest soils are very poor due to the water and nutrients in the environment being sapped up by the natural vegetation
  • People who move to the forest who often discover that they can farm for only a few seasons before soil nutrients are sapped or eroded by heavy tropical rains
  • Puts dangerous pressure on a very sensitive and valuable natural resource
• Extensive pastoralism: the shifting of animal herds between grazing pastures, has remained popular in several arid parts of the world, especially Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, where dry grassland is the common landcover
  • Too many people and too many animals are placing population pressure on too little land
• Overgrazing has led to significant amounts of dry grassland being denuded, eroded, and as a result, decertified
• Desertification: any human process that turns a vegetated environment into a desert-like landscape
• Soil salination: the evaporation of water that can trap mineral salts on the surface soil layer. High daytime temperatures cause water vapor to be drawn out of irrigated farmland. As evaporation continues over several growing seasons, the amount of mineral salt can build to toxic levels and poison crops

Agricultural Practices

• Cultural practices affect how food is grown
  • Religion plays a role in determining agricultural trade and practices
  • EX: dietary restrictions can limit the trade of beef (to India) or pork (to Islamic societies)
  • Family history plays other types of roles in agriculture
  • EX: first-generation farmers may view planting differently than second- or third-generation farmers
  • Culture determines different levels of societal support for farmers, many of whose fortunes often rise and fall based on the weather
  • EX: Countries with larger governmental safety nets tend to support farmers in a more socialistic manner
  • Available resources also affect agricultural practice
  • EX:  Irrigation becomes necessary in water-scarce regions

Agricultural Revolutions

• New farming methods reduced the amount of labor needed to produce goods and increased the amount of goods harvested per unit of land
• The general historical pattern is that revolutions began in one place and diffused around the world over time

First Agricultural Revolution:

• Vegetative planting: where the shoots, stems, and roots of existing wild plants were collected and grown together
• Seed agriculture: where the fertilized seed grains and fruits of plants were collected and replanted together
  • The domestication of plants took place by early farmers rejecting the poorly growing crops, and taking cuttings or seeds from the more productive, better-tasting plants to grow future generations
• Horticulture: where plant varieties that thrived in different soil or climate conditions were cultivated
  • Regions of agriculture emerged where certain crops were grown under optimal conditions for an area’s specific cultural tastes
• Hearths of domestication: the areas where most of this early agricultural activity originated
• Wild breeds that were productive were purposely interbred or hybridized to be reproduced through animal husbandry
• Growing areas of crops and livestock expanded as domesticated varieties were traded and diffused across the landscape
• The Columbian exchange: domesticated New World crops that made their way to the rest of the world through relocation diffusion
  • (EX: maize, from the new world, and wheat, from the old world, were exchanged)

Second Agricultural Revolution:

• Technological changes in agriculture were enabled by parallel innovations in manufacturing from the Industrial Revolution
  • (EX: Whitney’s cotton gin in 1793)
• Big changes were the development of specialized hybrids, artificial chemical fertilizers, early chemical pesticides, and mechanization in the form of trucks, tractors, and pumps
  • Increased food production and allowed for better diets and therefore longer life expectancy
• Modern science has had a critical role to play in horticulture and chemistry by using laboratory techniques to develop plant and animal hybrids that grow larger or under certain climatic conditions to meet the needs of farmers in different regions.
  • Dwarf varieties were an important plant hybrid innovation
• German chemists were the first to synthesize both artificial fertilizers and chemical insecticides
  • Ammonium nitrate was first mass-produced as a fertilizer to replace lost nitrogen in soils
  • Pesticides were developed during the 1840s from natural sources and from synthetic chemicals
  • Included insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, rodenticides, and nematocides
• Green Revolution: occurred in the 1950s and 1960s when tropical plant and animal hybrids and chemical fertilizers and pesticides began to be used in Third-World agriculture
  • Impact on the Third World has made for far greater amounts of crop production on small plots of land
  • Mechanization has been much slower to diffuse, mainly due to the high cost of large-scale farm equipment, excluding irrigation pumps
• Some modernized practices have done significant environmental damage:
  • Water supplies have been depleted from irrigation and contaminated by chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers
  • Focus on exportable cash crops can result in a loss of biodiversity and soil degradation
  • The rising cost of seeds, equipment, and chemicals forces many small farmers into debt

Third Agricultural Revolution:

• Marked the start of a more inclusive way of farming and the internationalization of industrialized farming
  • Primary economic activity - farmers now produce one or more crops
  • Secondary economic activity - process the crop
  • Tertiary economic activity - advertise and market it through afarmer’s co-op or other market
• The use of larger, more powerful agricultural machinery is the second hallmark of modern commercial agriculture
  • Replaced both human and beast in the early 20th century in the United States and then spread to Europe after World War II
• Research in biotechnology and food processing has made agribusiness a truly “big business.”
• Increased economies of scale, meaning that large-scale producers are able to achieve lower per-unit costs

Agricultural Production Regions

• Factors that have all combined to enable industrial agriculture, or factory farming
  • Genetic engineering has further increased the possibilities and productivity of global agriculture
  • (EX: BT corn has spliced genes from a bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis to make them pest-resistant)
  • Veterinary science and biotechnology research have developed vaccines, antibiotics, and growth hormones that have reduced farm animal mortality and increased the yields of meat, eggs, etc
• Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, or rBGH: a synthetic hormone widely used in both the production of beef and milk in the United States and some other countries.
  • Investment in these drugs can significantly increase meat and milk yields, and thus increase farm profitability
• The combination of genetically modified chicken breeds, avian growth hormones, and antibiotics to prevent bacterial diseases from spreading in large flocks has made indoor egg-farming operations possible
• Agriculture is moving toward extensive monoculture of staple crops, especially in Anglo-America
• Corporate agriculture, or agribusiness: large- scale extensive farms of several thousand acres or several thousand animals that are controlled by a single regional business
  • Large multinational corporations purchase hundreds of thousands of acres that are then leased to local contractors who use the company’s seed or chemicals to produce crops
  • Increasingly dependent on factory farms
• Downer cattle: beef cows that appear ill or are lame and cannot be used for human consumption, but can wind up in pet food or animal feed instead
• Low crop prices, low profitability, increasing fuel costs, and competition from big agribusiness firms have made farming very difficult for the traditional small-scale family farm
• Governments extended vast amounts of low-interest loans, price supports, and other subsidy programs to aid farmers who at the time had significant political influence in agricultural states and provinces
• Many farms’ mortgages were foreclosed due to the farmers’ inability to make money as a result of low commodity prices for crops

SPECIALIZED AGRICULTURE

• Those who wanted to survive the farm crisis in rural areas had a few options:
  • Start farming as a contractor for agribusiness
  • Buy out other farmers and go into agribusiness for yourself
  • Stick with your current farm and get into specialized farm products
• The public and consumers resistant to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), skeptics of artificial hormones, and those concerned about animal welfare have rejected many of the farming practices used by agribusiness
  • A large market for so-called natural food products has emerged, and many small family farms have restructured their operations to meet the rapidly increasing demand for such products as a result

Non-GMO Foods

• Farmers can certify their products as non-GMO and bring a premium price from natural foods processors and consumers looking for the non-GMO label in the U.S. and Canada
• Food from GMOs must carry a label warning consumers of the product’s contents in Europe
  • Consumers worry that genetically modified plants and animals could interbreed and contaminate natural food supplies or the environment, thus doing potential long-term harm

Organics, Antibiotics, and Hormone-Free

• Organic: crops and animals must not be grown using genetic engineering, must be free of pesticides, antibiotics, and synthetic hormones, must not use artificial fertilizers, and must feed on completely organic crops
  • Seen as a much more sustainable form of farming due to the lack of artificial chemicals
• Many crops have been so highly modified by hybridization that only a few commercial

heirloom varieties are available to consumers

• Concerns over animal welfare and loss of flavor in agribusiness-produced meats and eggs have led to increased consumer demand for free-range poultry, eggs, and beef
  • Farmers must have open pastures or large outdoor poultry pens where natural vegetation grows
• Grass-fed cattle have also brought significantly higher prices to gourmet consumers who seek the more natural-tasting beef, as corn- and soy-based cattle feed has been blamed for less flavorful beef
• Many small farms have expanded or switched to alternative livestock such as duck, lamb, and goosesince they also produce wool and feather down for clothing and housewares for added farm earnings
• There is increased consumer demand for value-added agricultural products, where food is processed on the farm and significantly increases in value, and more money goes to the farmer
  • Advertised by their appellation, the local or regional geographic name for the product
  • Champagne, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and other names are protected so that only products produced in the local area or region can have the appellation on the label.

Fair Trade

• To maximize profits, some corporations pay producers at the base of the supply chain extremely low wages, forcing them to work long hours in potentially unsafe working conditions.
• Fair trade movement: focuses on ensuring that small farmers and artisans are paid a fair price for their products
  • Businesses that want to source fair trade products typically undergo a certification process with one of several international fair trade federations and work with cooperatives of small farmers

Aquaculture

• Fish farming is a rapidly growing industry that small farmers can engage in and be profitable
  • Aquaculture in bays and estuaries has resulted in very profitable small-scale oyster and salmon farms

General Specialized Agriculture

• Specialized crops play an important role in the diversity of foods in terms of both farm economy and the cultural specificity of consumers
  • Small family farms and commercial farms grow these crops since they bring higher amounts of money per acre than basic grain staples
• Truck farms in the eastern United States and Canada grow specialty crops during the summer growing season, since much industrial dairy production has moved to the upper Midwest
• Suitcase farmers: farm owners who have city jobs but still own land in rural areas
  • Engage in specialty crop farming for added personal earnings and to keep old family traditions and farms alive
• Community-supported agriculture (CSA): programs in which produce and other farm products are delivered directly to individual consumers
• Specialty crops form Florida, South Texas, and Southern California and imports from Newland, Mexico and Australia keep Canadian and American stores stocked

Mediterranean Agriculture

• Mediterranean crops that have been domesticated and continuously grown in the region:

• Areas outside of the Mediterranean that have a similar climate and produce Mediterranean crops:
  • Southern and Central California
  • Central Florida
  • South Texas
  • Southern and Central Brazil
  • Southern China and Southeast Asia
  • Hawaii
  • Northern Argentina
  • Uruguay
  • Central Chile
  • Black Sea Coastal Areas
  • South Africa
  • Southern Australia

Plantation Agriculture

• In the tropical and sub-tropical climates of the world, it is common to find extensive plantation agriculture, specialized crops intended for both domestic consumption and for export to other parts of the world
  • Plantation production can prove to be a risky financial investment for many countries, leading to attempts to diversify the types of crops grown for export and reduce the potential for national economic downturns due to losses from a single crop

Dairy

• Dairying is done mainly with cows but can also be a specialized agricultural activity using goats and buffalo for cheese production
  • Yields milk for drinking, cheeses, yogurt, butter, and cream
  • A major concern with milk is spoilage, hence the long history of producing cheeses and yogurt to preserve excess milk for long-term usage
• Milkshed: the region around a city to which fresh milk is delivered without spoiling In terms of travel time and distance
• Processed dairy like cheese and yogurt production in the United States has continually moved westward over the last 150 years
• Milk is often homogenized (mixed in large batches) to create a consistent flavor and sold in a number of grades based on the amount of fat content
• Ultra-high temperature (UHT) pasteurization: a new milk preservation method where milk is flash-pasteurized at very high temperatures and under pressure to keep the water in it from turning to steam and then stored in a sterile box container that is sealed in plastic to prevent contamination

Women in Agriculture

• Women play an essential role in global agricultural production, but face a gender gap in pay equity and access to resources
  • May be unpaid workers on family farms or paid labor on other farms even though women make up 43% of the agricultural labor force on average
  • Agricultural extension services and training exclude women in many developing countries
  • Female-headed farms are less likely to be extended credit than male-owned farms
  • Areas in which women face greater barriers in farming also tend to have higher rates of undernourishment

Global Systems of Agriculture

• Agriculture accounted for a full third of the global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2014
  • Most of that economic activity occurs in poor and developing countries, so the ability to grow and export crops can have an enormous impact on economic growth
• Commodity chains: links between producers and consumers in the journey from raw material to delivery of a finished product

Stages:

1. Inputs: Farming requires a number of elements to maximize both the size and quality of crop yield, such as fertilizers, pesticides and insecticides, water, tools, mechanical equipment, training, certifications, and research & development.
2. Production: Growing and harvesting crops takes place. Farmers and laborers who work to raise crops receive only a tiny share of the selling price of the end product.
3. Processing: Raw agricultural goods are turned into consumer products. Agribusinesses may contract with outside industries for services such as marketing, packaging, and transport.
4. Distribution: Agricultural products are sent to market by contracting with outside transport providers. This can be an independent farmers, wholesaler, or sold internationally.
5. Consumption: retailers and restaurants sell the final product to consumers
   • In the age of globalization and multinational agribusiness firms, many commodities follow a global supply chain
     • Affected by other factors such as infrastructure, political relationships, and economic and trade developments
     • Infrastructure is an essential piece of being able to move goods around a country
     • Internal and external political developments may impact the functionality of a supply chain
     • Shifting policies and political tensions often lead to reduced trade activity, or embargoes that completely ban trade or commercial interaction with a particular country
   • Commodity-dependent: when a single product or type of good accounts for more than 60% of its exports
     • The share of commodity-dependent countries sharply increases as the level of development decreases

MODELS

• Von Thünen’s Model: land use (the type of farming) is determined by how labor intensive the type of farming is

Rings Explained:

1. Village: the organization of a central marketplace and place of consumption for the agricultural goods produced in the surrounding area
2. Intensive Farming: Labor-intensive crops include fruits, garden vegetables, herbs, and anything that required constant tending or weeding or that needed to be picked for market at a particular time. Labor-intensive animals include dairy cows and egg-producing poultry. Medicinal crops, such as herbs, were grown along with vegetables in town market gardens for local sale
3. Village Forest: A managed forest was needed to meet the energy and lumber needs of the community. Managed cutting and replanting of trees was done sustainably to be a renewable resource.
4. Extensive Farming: Labor-extensive crops require large plots of land and far less tending because they dominated potential weed invaders.
5. Grazing Lands: Highlands in peripheral areas were often not suitable for crop farming but perfect for grazing. Animals have to be moved periodically to keep from overgrazing meadows and pastures.

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• Cost-to-distance relationship: an inverse relationship between the value of labor and the distance from the center of the model; the higher the total labor costs, the closer it is to the center, and the lower the labor costs, the farther it is from the center
  • Labor costs can be equated to the price of rent paid by peasants to farm a piece of land generally owned by aristocrats under the political economy of feudalism
• Land-rent curve: a mathematical function that shows the changes in rent prices across the model

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