1. Unit 2A Lesson 2 How are different farms organised?
Effects of the wrong amount of food
Why is there too little food?
What can be done?

2. (a) How are different farms organised and classified?

3. Farming can be classified according to …
Specialisation – what kind of products are produced
Its economic status
How intensively it uses the land
Land tenure – how it holds/uses land

4. Farming can be classified according to …
Specialisation – what kind of products are produced
Farms that produce mainly field crops such as rice, or wheat or soya or sugar are called arable
Farms that mostly rear animals are called pastoral e.g. Sheep farms in Wales, cattle in Australia
Farms that do both are called mixed farms.
Horticulture is the production of fruit, vegetables, mushrooms and ornamental plants, can be seen as a farming activity, which is becoming increasingly international, e.g. flowers from Kenya and salad leaves from Holland

5. Farming can be classified according to …
Its economic status
Nearly all MEDC farms produce goods for sale – they aim is to make a profit. They are commercial enterprises. There are also commercial plantations and ranches in LEDCs which supply us with coffee and their cities with meat.
However in many parts of LEDCs, the farms are essentially there to produce enough food to feed the families that live on them. This is called a subsistence economy. Most will aim to produce some goods for sale so that they can afford things they cannot produce for themselves, like clothing or to pay for their children’s schooling.

6. Farming can be classified according to …
How intensively it uses the land
Where a lot is produced in a small area, then it is called intensive production. Examples of this include rice paddies and market gardening (horticulture). Where you get a high level of outputs, there is invariably a high level of inputs in terms or labour, chemicals and equipment
Where the soil is poor and little can be produced, such as sheep farming in the hills, you have few inputs in terms of labour and few outputs per hectare. This is extensive production.

7. Farming can be classified according to …
Land tenure – how the farmer holds/uses land
The vast majority of farmers in modern times rent or own a piece of ground which they work throughout their lives. They are said be sedentary.
However there are still cultivators and pastoralists that move around. These are said to practice a nomadic or shifting existence.
Nomads are pastoralists who follow their herds in seasonal fashion e.g. reindeer herds in northern Europe and Asia.
Shifting cultivators take over a pieces of ground, usually in tropical forests, cut down and burn the tress, plant their crops and stay only as long as the soil is productive – then they move on every 3 – 7 years.

8. Which words might refer to these?
Arable
Commercial farms
Extensive agriculture
Horticultural
Intensive agriculture
Mixed
Nomadic farmers
Pastoral
Sedentary Farmers
Shifting agriculture
Subsistence farms

9. Homework
As you will have noted there have been a lot of red in this last section – these are all key words.
On the homework sheet will be a list of all these keywords.
You are to think up questions, the answer to each of which is one of these key words.
The best of these will be incorporated into a quiz that I will – eventually, once I have most of them in – put on the wiki!

10. (b) Effects of the wrong amount of food (c) Why is there too little food? (d) What can be done?

11. Farming is the most important primary industry
Sufficient food is essential but many people do not have enough
Textbook page 60
Shows a slightly different view – it is worth a look
Africa: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania,
Asia: Russia, N. Korea, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan Europe: Bosnia Middle East: Iraq, Syria, Tajikistan, Jordan South America: Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Honduras Oceania: Papua New Guinea

12. What do we need? Calories
< 1900
All the darkest browns are in trouble –
< 2300 is not good!

13. But remember some people have too much food. What are the effects?
Too much – as you see in many MEDCs – and there are increasing problems with obesity.
This means that there are increasing numbers of stokes and heart disease.
It could be, that unlike in the past, where life expectancy increases every decade, that for MEDCs it might start to go down, because too many people eat too much of the wrong sort of food – and not enough of the right sort.

14. What are the effects of too few calories?
In many African nations, people only managed to consume about 80% of their required calories (around 1800 calories a day).
A lack of calories and the right vitamins cause malnutrition, making people weak and sick.
Many people get illnesses that make them too sick to work. This leads to a cycle of hunger

15. The Cycle of Hunger

16. What are the causes of famine?
Some people believe that it is mostly down to laziness or ignorance.
But it is usually a complex mix of one or more of the following:
Draught – when the rains fail
Desertification – when trees are cut down, which changes the local climate, turning an area that did support agriculture into a semi-desert
Poverty and/or landlessness – if the last harvest was bad, they have to eat their seed so they have nothing left to plant

17. More causes of famine
Wars – the farmers often have to leave their homes to save their lives. So they cannot plant their crops.
What happened to Abdi Husein’s Farm in Somalia
First there was famine.
Once it has passed he grew corn, tomatoes and olives and a few animals. He was doing well.
Then the soldiers came and took all his food and belongings
He and his family fled to the town. All his children died, either from gunshot wounds on the way or hunger. He and his wife survived in the town until food aid arrived.

18. More causes of famine
Trade – LEDCs get low prices for their cash crops but have to pay high prices for the goods they do not make and have to import.
A way out – Fair Trade means a fairer price for the produces and investment in the communities

19. More causes of famine
International debt – poor countries who have had to borrow money spend a lot on ‘servicing the debt’ – in other words making their interest payments – so there is little left to invest in farming.
Make Poverty History Campaign
G8's Gleneagles meeting in July encouraged by mass protests world wide promised debt relief to many poor countries, provided they could prove that the released money would be put to good use.
Armies need not apply!

20. The global food crisis The phrase on everyone’s mind this summer.
What caused it?
Most people concentrated on biofuels as being the main problem.
Land was turned over to palm oil, wheat production, sugar production.
But that was not the whole problem.

21. The global food crisis
Droughts in major wheat-producing countries in ( e.g. in Australia, a very large producer, has almost total crop failure)
So there were low grain reserves
High oil prices – this pushed up the price of running machines, shipping goods and of course fertilizer
A doubling of per-capita meat consumption in some developing countries – and do you know how much grain it takes to make a kilo of beef? The figures vary but most say about 11kg of grain!

22. Why a Green Revolution?
The world's worst recorded food disaster happened in 1943 in British-ruled India.
Known as the Bengal Famine, an estimated four million people died of hunger that year alone in eastern India (that included today's Bangladesh).
The initial theory put forward to 'explain' that catastrophe was that there as an acute shortfall in food production in the area.
But it was also due to hoarding – the Second World War was in full swing and western governments were worried about having enough food. So the merchants were storing it away in the hope of getting a higher price later.
When the British left India four years later in 1947, India, haunted by memories of the Bengal Famine, put food security high on its list of things that needed to be sorted out.
This led to:
the Green Revolution in India and,
legislative measures preventing businessmen from hoarding food for profit.

23. What was the green revolution
It applied to the period from 1967 to 1978.
Between 1947 and 1967, efforts at achieving food self-sufficiency were not entirely successful. They did expand the area being farmed. But starvation deaths still happened. So further change was needed
The term "Green Revolution" is a general one that is applied to successful agricultural experiments in many Third World countries. It is NOT specific to India. But it was most successful in India.
What was the Green Revolution in India?
There were three basic elements in the method of the Green Revolution:
(1) Continued expansion of farming areas;
(2) Double-cropping existing farmland;
(3) Using seeds with improved genetics.

24. The most important features
Double-cropping was a primary feature of the Green Revolution. Instead of one crop season per year, the decision was made to have two crop seasons per year. The one-season-per-year practice was based on the fact that there is only natural monsoon per year. This was correct. So, there had to be two "monsoons" per year. One would be the natural monsoon and the other an artificial 'monsoon.'
The artificial monsoon came in the form of huge irrigation facilities. Dams were built to arrest large volumes of natural monsoon water which were earlier being wasted.
Also new strains of high yield value (HYV) seeds, mainly wheat and rice but also millet and corn were developed.
Dr. M.P. Singh was regarded as the hero of India's Green revolution as he was the major scientists behind the development of HYVs.

25. What did the Green revolution achieve?
(1) The Green Revolution resulted in a record grain output of 131 million tons in This established India as one of the world's biggest agricultural producers. No other country in the world which attempted the Green Revolution recorded such level of success. India also became an exporter of food grains around that time.
(2) Yield per unit of farmland improved by more than 30 per cent between 1947 (when India gained political independence) and 1979 when the Green Revolution was considered to have delivered its goods.
(3) The crop area under HYV varieties grew from seven per cent to 22 per cent of the total cultivated area during the 10 years of the Green Revolution. More than 70 per cent of the wheat crop area, 35 per cent of the rice crop area and 20 per cent of the millet and corn crop area, used the HYV seeds.

26. What did the Green revolution achieve?
Economic results of the Green Revolution
(1) Crop areas under high-yield varieties needed more water, more fertilizer, more pesticides, fungicides and certain other chemicals. This new local industry created new jobs and contributed to the country's GDP.
(2) More reservoirs needed more dams that were used to make hydro-electric power. This in turn boosted industrial growth, created jobs and improved the quality of life of the people in villages.
(3) India paid back all loans it had taken from the World Bank and others to fund the Green Revolution. This improved India's creditworthiness.
(4) Some developed countries, especially Canada, which were facing a shortage in agricultural labour, invited Indian farmers experienced in the methods of the Green Revolution, because the Green Revolution had been so successful. (That's why Canada today has many Punjabi-speaking citizens of Indian origin).

27. What were the drawbacks of the Green revolution?
With more machinery there was more rural unemployment and so there was an increase in rural to urban migration
Rural Poverty – only the larger, richer farmers could afford the HYV seeds, the fertilizer and the pesticides need to ensure the HYV seeds performed well.
Heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides damaged water courses.
Some of the reservoirs were built on fertile land, displacing the farmers who used to live there
Frequent irrigation led to a build-up of salts in the soil, making it less fertile.

28. The Global food crisis and Africa
Where as Asia and Mexico and South America have all increased the amount of food they produce, Africa has, if anything, gone backwards.
There has been little investment – that has been left to NGOs who have tried small sustainable local projects, which have done a lot of good but only in a small way.
Now there is talk of a Green Revolution for Africa – and there is a lot of discussion about how this should be achieved
GM producers are champing at the bit – saying that they and only they have the solution.
Other look at the first Green Revolution and say specialist seeds and fertilizer and high tech is not the way to go.

29. Take a look at the other side to the argument
An analysis of 114 projects in 24 African countries found that yields had more than doubled where organic, or near-organic practices had been used. That increase in yield jumped to 128 per cent in east Africa. The study found that organic practices outperformed traditional methods and chemical-intensive conventional farming. It also found strong environmental benefits such as improved soil fertility, better retention of water and resistance to drought.

30. Later on we will come back and develop this a bit more
It will appear in various ways in development(2B) and Human Welfare (3C)