AP Human Geography Unit 5: Agriculture, Food Production, and Rural Land Use

Evolutionary Sequence of Food Production: The historical development of agricultural techniques progressed through the following stages:
    * Vegetative Agriculture: The earliest form of plant cultivation.
    * Seed Agriculture: The subsequent development focusing on seed-based crops.
    * The Columbian Exchange: The global diffusion of plants, animals, and diseases between the Old and New Worlds.
Agricultural Hearths:
* Seed Agriculture in the Western Hemisphere: Two primary independent hearths for seed agriculture originated in Southern Mexico and Peru.
* Rice Domestication: Rice was most likely domesticated earliest in Southeast Asia.
Vegetative Planting: This method is associated with specific early diffusion maps showing the movement of agricultural practices from Southeast Asian hearths to other regions.

Subsistence vs. Commercial Agriculture:
* Commercial Agriculture: Characterized by larger farm sizes, mechanized labor, and more extensive use of fertilizers. Commercial farmers are also less likely to allow fields to remain fallow compared to shifting agriculturalists.
* Subsistence Farming: Defined as a system where a farmer produces only enough food for the immediate family.
Extensive Subsistence Farming: This category includes practices that use large areas of land with minimal labor/capital input per unit of land. Examples include:
* Shifting Cultivation (swidden agriculture).
* Pastoral Nomadism.
Labor-Intensive Intertillage: This practice is most frequently found in areas where farmers practice shifting cultivation, requiring significant manual labor to manage multiple crops in the same field.
Modern Industrial Agriculture: Characteristics of this system include:
    * Specialization of crops.
    * Signing legal agreements with buyer-processors.
    * Participation in global exchange networks.
    * Involvement of farmers in less developed countries (LDCs).
    * Note: It is NOT characterized by prices being met by the individual needs of farmers; prices are determined by global market forces.

Primary Sector Activities: These involve the direct extraction of natural resources. Examples include:
    * Agriculture.
    * Fishing.
    * Raising animals/Livestock.
    * Forestry.
    * Exclusion: Refining petroleum into gasoline is a secondary sector activity because it involve processing/manufacturing.
Primary Sector Employment Distributions: Among major nations, Nigeria has the largest percentage of its workforce employed in the primary sector, indicating a high reliance on agriculture.

The World's Breadbasket: This term refers to the prairies of North America, which are critical for global grain production.
Mediterranean Agriculture: The two most significant cash crops produced in Mediterranean climates (e.g., Greece, Italy, California) are olives and grapes.
Livestock Markets: While countries like Argentina, Uruguay, and New Zealand are major exporters, livestock raised in the United States is more likely to be sold in the domestic market.
Specific Regional Agriculture (Mapped): Shaded areas (such as the Western US/Interior regions) are often associated with livestock ranching.

Commodity Exchange (New World to Eastern Hemisphere): Several major crops originated in the Americas and were traded to the Eastern Hemisphere during the Columbian Exchange:
    * Beans.
    * Squash.
    * Maize (corn).
    * Potatoes.
    * Exclusion: Wheat was NOT first raised in the Americas; it was brought to the Americas from the Eastern Hemisphere.
Transportation Evolution: The development of refrigerated ships and railroad cars most directly revolutionized the long-distance global transportation of beef, allowing it to reach markets without spoiling.

Metes and Bounds: This survey system uses natural features (like trees, streams, or rocks) to mark the boundaries of irregular parcels of land.
Rectilinear Patterns: Land parcels in the United States Midwest are most likely to be rectilinear due to the Township and Range survey system.
Von Thünen Model: In this model of agricultural land use, animal grazing takes place in the outermost ring around a market center because it requires the most land and animals can be walked to market, minimizing transport costs for low-value-per-acre land.

Desertification: This process has had the strongest negative impact on food production in the African Sahel, where semi-arid land is turning into desert due to overgrazing and climate shifts.
Limits to Food Production: The primary factor limiting the expansion of global food production through land cultivation is that most of the world's arable land is already under cultivation.
The Green Revolution: While successful in many parts of Asia and Latin America, the Green Revolution has had the least impact on the people of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Hunter-Gatherer vs. Agricultural Societies: A key social difference between these groups is that early hunter-gatherer societies were less likely to be characterized by gender inequality compared to early agricultural societies, which often developed more rigid hierarchies and divisions of labor.