Agriculture

 Agricultural practices are influenced by the physical environment and climate.

People eat. It is what they do. Birds do it to. Bees do it. You get the idea. Plants have the ability to transform the energy of the sun into useable carbohydrates and other plant matter. Plants store up the energy of the sun in their mass. Herbivorous animals, by definition, eat plants. They thus convert the stored energy of the sun into cows and bunny rabbits and other plant eating animals. They have to. Lacking the ability to photosynthesize the light of the sun, animals exist because they can eat plants. Some animals, of course, eat the animals that eat the plants. Humans, at least those humans who are not vegetarians, eat plants and animals.

For the first three hundred thousand years or so that humans existed, our ancestors lived off of the nuts, berries, and invertebrates that could be found in the landscape. Occasionally, they killed a larger animal and ate well for a few days until the meat turned rancid and inedible. Most hunting and gathering societies seem to have collected a lot more calories from gathering than hunting, and for those societies fortunate enough to have made their homes by the water, fishing provided an even more efficient way to add calories to the diet.

But here is the thing about hunting and gathering. Both require a large investment in calories in order to eat. All living things have to maintain a balance between the calories needed to live another day—somewhere between 1500 and 2000 calories—and the calories that must be expended to acquire those calories. If a hunter expends five hundred calories running down a rabbit from which he can gain only 400 calories, he would have been better off sitting still and being hungry.

Fortunately for humanity (less so for the bunny rabbits), human hunters proved to be innovative. Projectile weapons like the javelin, atlatl, and bow and arrow allowed hunters to bring down larger, faster prey. More calories could be brought home for the family dinner with fewer calories expended.

This narrow balance between calories expended and calories gained tends to keep populations low. High birth rates combined with high death rates caused human populations to remain stable at both local and global scales. You might recognize this as Stage One of the Demographic Transition Model.

The gradual in invention of agriculture, beginning around 10,000 BCE (or possibly earlier) changed everything.

Agriculture refers to the domestication and production of plants (lets call that farming), and animals (which we can call ranching). They are as different as hunting is from gathering.

Gathering (or foraging) demands that one pay attention. The natural landscape is filled with plants that can safely and deliciously provide calories on a daily basis. Even a suburban American landscape provided dandelions, mushrooms, herbs, blackberries, and other additions to the diet that are pretty much free for the taking. The landscape (including the suburban landscape), is also filled with completely inedible plants that, while they won’t kill you, will require more energy to digest than they provide (there is a reason cows have five stomachs—they are really efficient at digesting grass). And of course, the landscape also provides plenty of plants that look like they ought to be food but that will kill the unwary forager, or at least make one very, very sick. How does one know the difference?

Our foraging ancestors (and foraging contemporaries for that matter), learned to pay attention. They gradually noticed the role that seeds played in plant propagation and, apparently, saved some of the edible seeds through the winter and planted them in the spring. When it worked, these first experiments with farming provided more food with less work than constant foraging. But this did not immediately create farmers. Modern rice, wheat, and corn do not grow in the wild. For the most part, they require human help in reproducing. Evidently, the first farmers did not just plant wild seeds, they selectively bred wild plants to produce characteristics that they found desirable. Thus, farming likely began as an extension of foraging.

Something similar happened with the first ranchers. Hunters also have to pay attention and think ahead. At some point at the end of the last ice age, it occurred to a few hunters (probably in western Asia), that there might be an advantage to protecting the wild cattle, sheep, and goats they were hunting from other predators and other human hunters. They began providing for the herds they hunted, keeping them safe and only harvesting a few animals for food and clothing. Thus did ranching begin as an extension of hunting. And just as farmers learned to produce crops with ever more desirable characteristics, ranchers killed off less desirable members of the herd—animals too aggressive for example—and created a world of domesticated animals.

Agriculture is a complex technology. Anthropologists and historians trace the first domestication of plants and animals (and the resultant domestication of people), to a small number of agricultural hearths.

From these relatively small zones of agricultural development and domestication, technologies and practices spread widely through diffusion. As farming people moved to new regions they took their seeds, animals, and practices with them. And, as neighboring people saw the advantages of farming, they adopted similar practices. People continued to hunt and forage, and some regions were not at all suited for agriculture, but as farming came to dominate the earth’s landscape, human populations began to grow. Societies that rejected farming—or lived in regions where it was not practical—lost ground to the farmers and ranchers.

Although farming has been essential for human civilization since the first cities were built five thousand years ago, farming practices have always been exceedingly diverse.

The First Agricultural Revolution—also called the Neolithic Revolution—refers to the invention of agriculture. Although certainty is impossible, it appears that the first agricultural societies emerged in Southwest Asia—Modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel—about twelve thousand years before the present (BP). Agriculture seems to have been independently invented in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia and then, much later, in Central America. From those hearths, Agricultural practices diffused into Europe, China, India and, the rest of the Americas.

Intensive farming practices: Traditional farming practices in densely populated regions like Southeast Asia tend to be intensive. With limited land and many mouths to feed, farmers try to get as much productivity out of every square foot of land they possibly can. This often requires labor intensive practices in planting, irrigation, and harvesting. Terrace farming is an effective form of intensive farming, turning, at great cost in labor, land that would otherwise be too steep to permit plowing and planting into highly productive land.

Much of the farming one finds in the United States and Canada reflects extensive agricultural practices. Because farmland is relatively inexpensive while labor is very expensive in these countries, farmers can afford to plant fields of hundreds or thousands of acres. Tractors, harvesters, and other technologies allow the work to be done with far less labor.

But even in America, not every agricultural product can be completely mechanized. Wheat, cotton, rice, sugar cane, and much else can be planted, cultivated, and harvested mechanically, but no one has yet developed a process for harvesting strawberries, apples, peaches, or pretty much any other vegetable except by going into the fields and picking them by hand.

As an economic activity, farming can also take on a variety of forms. At a very basic level, farms are businesses—akin to factories. Untended and uncultivated, a natural landscape produces little of economic value. It takes an investment of labor and capital to turn a natural landscape into productive farmland.

Even then, there are limits as to what any given farm can produce.

The choropleth world map above highlights the world’s major wheat producing regions. You might notice that wheat production, while very widespread, is limited to the world’s temperate, moderately rainy regions. Deserts produce little wheat. The tropics produce even less.

Rice production is far more limited geographically than is wheat, but is a product of intensive agriculture in South, Southeast, and East Asia. It is grown in much smaller quantities in Southern Europe and Africa. In the United States, the Mississippi Delta is home to huge rice farms, allowing the US to be an important rice exporting country in the global economy.

Most of the food consumed in the world’s most highly developed economies is produced on large, highly mechanized farms in where production is focused on a single commodity. This kind of “plantation agriculture” is extensive rather than intensive and produces commodities that can be processed, transported, and stored for long periods.

Not everything is amenable to large-scale commodity production practices. Fresh fruits and vegetables will spoil very quickly and need to be consumed (or preserved through canning, freezing, or drying) within a few days of being harvested. Called “market gardening” even when they are actually farms specialize in crops like tomatoes, strawberries, apples, and the like, are often relatively close to urban centers so that their produce can move quickly from farm to market to table. There is a reason New Jersey is called the Garden State. In the Nineteenth Century, New Jersey produced much of the fresh food consumed in New York City and Philadelphia. As railroads and highway systems, as well as refrigeration, made it possible to speed fresh fruits and vegetables to urban areas more quickly, farmers farther and farther away were able to get their food to large, and profitable, market areas.

Smaller farms also tend to be engage in mixed crop production—rotating crop production from one year to the next, raising livestock as well as crops, and thus becoming less vulnerable to market swings and crop failures. On a small scale, this is called market gardening or truck farming (“truck” because the produce is trucked directly to market and is delivered to consumers relatively unmodified from its original state.

At the smallest, most local scale, many of the world’s farmers engage in subsistence agriculture, producing all or most of the calories needed by their family with little left over to market. And, of course, many people, including this writer, devote a part of their back yard to growing fruits and vegetables, not for their economic value as much for the joy of eating produce that one has grown oneself.

Subsistence farming often requires complex skills and time-tested practices. In places with marginal soil fertility and low population densities, farmers might shift cultivation from one place to another on a regular basis. When one field has been exhausted, it might be left fallow for several years while the farmer moves to a new field to cultivate. Some cultures practice “slash and burn” farming, burning a field to prepare it for cultivation, planting crops there for several years, and then moving on, eventually back to the field initially abandoned and starting the process over again.

And when large, grazing animals are being raised, many farmers in sparsely settled regions will move the animals and themselves from one grazing ground to another over many miles. In the American West, ranchers move sheep and cattle from one field to another to prevent them from destroying the grass crop which is essential to meat production.

Rural Settlement Patterns

Land-use patterns

Rural Settlement Patterns: clustered, dispersed, linear.

Rural Survey Methods: Metes and Bounds, township, range, long lot.

Early Hearths of Agriculture and Domestication

Fertile Crescent

Southeast Asia

Central America

Patterns of agricultural diffusion

Agricultural Exchange

Agricultural Revolutions

Neolithic Revolution

Second Agricultural Revolution

Green Revolution: high-yield seeds, chemicals, mechanization, impacts on the environment and human populations.

Agricultural Production Regions

Subsistence Farming

Commercial Farming

Monocropping/monoculture

Bid-rent theory and the cost of land (and what could more profitably be done with the same land)

Spatial-Organization of agriculture

Large-scale commercial agriculture replacing family farms.

Complex commodity chains link production and consumption.

Economies of Scale

Global carrying capacity

von Thunen’s land use model: transportation costs, distance from market, speciality farming. concetric rings.

Food in the global supply chain

dependency on a single export or import

Main elements of global food distribution networks affected by political relationships, infrastructure, patterns of world trade

Environmental effects of agricultural land use: pollution, land cover change, desertification, soil salinization, conservation efforts.

Agricultural Practices: slash and burn, terrace farming, irrigation, deforestation, wetland loss, shifting cultivation, pastoral nomadism.

Societal effects of agriculture: changing diets, roles of women in production, economic purpose of agriculture.

Agricultural innovations: biotechnology, GMOs, aquaculture.

Sustainability, soil nd water usage, loss of biodiversity, fertilizers and pesticides

Patterns of food production and consumption: individual food choice, urban farming, community supported agriculture, organic farming, value added specialty crops, fair trade, local-food movements, dietary shifts.

Challenges of feeding a global population:

Food insecurity

food deserts

distribution inequities

adverse weather

urban sprawl and the loss of agricultural land

Location of food-processing facilities and markets.

Economies of Scale

Distribution Systems

Government policies in food production and distribution.

Women in Agriculture

Roles of women in food production and consumption.