1. Agriculture
Defined as the growing of crops and the tending of livestock, whether for the subsistence of the producers or for sale or exchange, has replaced hunting and gathering as economically the most significant of the primary activities.
Covers 5.8 million sq. miles (10% of the earth’s total land area)
Certain areas (Nepal and Bhutan) 90%
Europe 5%

2. Extensive Subsistence Agriculture
Large use of land and little labor
Two types of classified under Extenstive
Nomadic Herding
Shifting Cultivation

3. Nomadic Herding
“Wandering” controlled movement of livestock, solely dependent on natural forage, across a region.
Characteristics are hardiness, mobility, and an ability to subsist on sparse forage.
Animals provide milk, cheese, and meat for food
Found in Africa (next slide), Asia, and South America.

6. Shifting Cultivation Rotation of fields Swidden (English)
Slash and burn
Soil loses nutrients with too much farming. Need to find new dirt!!
Destroying rainforests all over the tropics.
Red dots represent fires burning all throughout Brazil into Bolivia. (taken by NASA in Sept. 2002)

7. Shifting cont… nearly 5% of the world’s people are engaged in tropical shifting. Crops: corn, millet, rice, manioc, yams, and sugarcane.

8. Intensive Subsistence Agriculture

9. Intensive cont… Small land use Very labor intensive
Changing, families feed their own from their plots while trading implementation for use on the fields.
Found in SE Asia in the rice fields. There is no way to plant/harvest rice with machinery. Also produce wheat, maize, millet, peas, beans, etc…

10. Location of Intensive Subsistence Ganges River Basin – India Yangtze - China

11. Green Revolution Crop yields go up from the same plot of land.
The Green Rev. is aided by Population Pressures and new agriculture technologies.

13. Commercial Agriculture
Produce material for market
Part of the exchange economy
Usually consists of massive farms (1000+ acres) or could be small lots of plants (coffee)

14. Intensive Commercial Agriculture
Large amounts of capital ($, machinery, fertilizer, labor) in agriculture
Olive harvesting

15. Tobacco harvesting

16. Peanut Harvesting

17. Extensive Commercial Agriculture
Farming that takes place further from the market on less expensive land.
Large wheat farms as well as livestock ranching
Farms – 1000 acres in Kansas, ND or Ranches - Argentina, Brazil, Australia

18. Von Thuen’s model

19. Special Crops Mediterranean Agriculture
Grapes, olives, oranges, figs, vegetables, etc…
Need warm temps and a great deal of sunshine
Plantation Crops
African coffee, Asian sugar, American cacao, tobacco, and rubber
Introducing a foreign element into a native culture, alien labor force.

20. Rubber & Cacao

21. Figs and Oranges