Types of Agriculture

10 Key excerpts on "Types of Agriculture"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Economic and Social Geography

  • R. Knowles, J. Wareing(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  Conclusion The type of agriculture practised in any area is determined by both physical and socio-economic factors. The environmental factors of climate, sou and relief impose certain restraints and limitations upon the range of crops that may be successfully cultivated and the types of livestock that may be profitably reared in an area. However, within any particular environment many choices and options are normally open to the farmer, and the actual farming pattern is determined by the farmer's evaluation of the possibilities offered by the en-vironment as well as various social and economic factors. These include farm size, type of tenure, consumer demand, transport and marketing facilities, the availability of capital, and government subsidies and support policies. The physical limits of production are relatively stable and can only be extended within fairly narrow limits, but the economic margin of production fluctuates according to demand. During periods of strong market demand and high profits, production may be extended into physically marginal areas, even though this usually involves lower yields and a greater risk of crop failure. 1 Nomadicherding 2 Livestock ranching 3 Shifting cultivation 4 Rudimental sedentary tillage 5 intensive subsistence tillage, rice dominant 6 Intensive subsistence tillage, without paddy rice 7 Commercial plantation crop tillage 8 Mediterranean agriculture 9 Commercial grain farming 10 Commercial livestock and crop farming 11 Subsistence crop and livestock farming 12 Commercial dairy farming 13 Specialised horticulture Fig. 11 .4. Principal types of world agriculture (after D. Whittlesey). 138 Economic and Social Geography Made Simple Classification and delimitation of agricultural regions on a world scale presents many problems. These arise chiefly from the inadequacy of the data base and the constantly changing character of farming activity in response to social, economic and technological developments.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Modern Farm Management: Principles and Practice

  • Boss, Andrew(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Biotech

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7 Characteristics of Types of Farming 1 Great variation in soil and climate tends to localize to a considerable extent the production of agricultural commodities, as shown in Chapter 5. Production is still further localised especially by the customs and desires of those who produce them. Agriculture is, therefore, classified within agricultural production areas into Types of Farming Areas. Attention is here called to the meaning of the term and to an analysis of the characteristic requirements of various types of farming. Types of Farming Defined The word “type” signifies a characteristic style or kind. Applied to a farm it denotes “a form of organisation and a method of operation representative of a group of farms, in which there is a high degree of uniformity in such essential factors as selection of enterprises, farm practice, and method of disposal of products.” 1 A study of farms within any of the agricultural commodity production regions outlined in Figure 5, will reveal that there are many variations in the kinds of farming and in the cultural practices of farm operators. These variations are the result of attempts of individual farm operators to adjust their resources to the immediately surrounding physical and economic environment, so as to obtain the greatest possible return for the capital and labour expended. Changes in crop varieties, new practices of tillage, the This ebook is exclusively for this university only. Cannot be resold/distributed. introduction of new machinery, infestations of plant or animal diseases, and changes in economic pressures make this matter of adjustment an ever-present problem that is never completely solved. The study will show, however, that there are many farmers in the group studied who include in the farm organisation approximately the same crops arid livestock, the same production practices, and who dispose of their products with a high degree of uniformity.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Geography of Agriculture in Developed Market Economies

  • I.R. Bowler(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5

  Farm types and agricultural regions

  John Aitchison    

  This and the following chapter examine the type-of-farm context for the contemporary transformation of agriculture. In this chapter attention is turned to the problems of classifying farm types and defining agricultural regions. Chapter 6 goes on to examine the changing enterprise structure of farm businesses.

  Like agricultural economists, who were among the first to develop farm classification (largely as a tool on which to base farm business advice), agricultural geographers have classified to satisfy a variety of objectives (Grigg 1969). Although the precise reasons for which individual classificatory studies have been carried out can be difficult to disentangle, often because they have not been explicity articulated, four overarching objectives can be distinguished.

  To present ordered information

  Farms and farming regions form complex, dynamic systems. To appreciate their character, to track trends and changes, and to facilitate comparative analysis, such systems need to be classified. Classification serves a fundamental descriptive purpose; it filters information with a view to isolating meaningful patterns of ordered variation. Needless to say, for many agricultural geographers it is patterns of spatial or regional variation in types of farming that are of major interest. While they might be criticized for being too heavily descriptive, there is no doubting the fact that most taxonomic studies are at least factually informative. This is especially true of investigations carried out in less well-documented regions of the world, and in regions where previously uncharted developments in farming practices have taken place. This knowledge- generating role of classificatory inquiry should not be underrated.

  To seek explanations and to generate hypotheses

  Patterns not only invite description, more importantly they invite explanation. In delimiting types-of-farming regions, for instance, agricultural geographers will normally endeavour to account for the spatial structures that emerge by citing the possible influence of particular processes or forces. Such factors include: soil conditions and climate; land, labour and capital availability; the size, demands and distance of relevant markets, including food processors; historical and cultural traditions; ideological constraints; systems of land tenure and the behavioural characteristics of farmers and growers.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Information Technology in agriculture

  • Hazem Shawky Fouda(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Delve Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Currently, the food supply feeds almost 7 billion people and still there is enough amount of food to serve a greater number of people. It has been observed that some of the practices have had very bad effects on the land. A lot of trees are being cut down for agricultural production and soils are becoming very exhausted rapidly while damaging the ecosystems. There have been several questions related to the utilization of pesticides and herbicides. Past few decades have observed various adverse or harmful substances that were banned in the European Union and North America. Introduction to Agriculture: A Global Perspective 11 Still, people are agreeing on the universal standards and they are trying to redefine the factors of what is ecologically and agriculturally sound, providing to the requirements of crop while not affecting the future generations. The technology of agriculture may likely to be on the edge of another revolution due to the advancement of biotechnology and agricultural science. 1.4. Types of Agriculture The field of agriculture is known as the most widespread activity all around the globe. However, it is not uniform all over the world. There are great number ways by which agriculture can be classified. Few of some ways that can be easily adapted consist of: • Intensity • Level of mechanization • Livestock combinations • Means of distribution of farm produce • Scale • Type of crop Given below are the major kinds of agriculture present around the globe. 1.4.1. Nomadic Herding Nomadic herding is completely based on the animal rearing on natural pastures. The people living in arid and semi-arid regions mainly do such kind of practice. These people used to stay on the move along with their animals in the search of natural pastures especially for their livestock to graze. The kind of animals reared varies greatly from one region to another. The typical regions for this kind of farming are Northern Africa, parts of northern Eurasia and parts of Arabia.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Urban Agriculture and Rural Agriculture

  The International Market

  • Stephanya Lynn JonasLabee(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Delve Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Figure 2.11: Farming in Indonesia. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Farming-on-Indonesia.jpg Urban Agriculture and Rural Agriculture: The International Market 44 Smaller urban centers are a market that is mostly overlooked. The costs of living have shot up in these times of ever-changing economies. Employment in rural areas is of utmost concern. The productivity of agricultural sector also needs to be improved in such areas. Due to limited means of connectivity, there is a huge gap between the urban areas and the countryside areas. This distances the rural people from so much in the city, and there builds a social divide, which is very hard to be broken down. The infrastructure of the rural areas that practice agriculture as the main occupation needs to improve drastically. 2.3. Types of Agriculture In the rural regions across the world, depending upon the terrain and the geography of the region, various types of farming methodologies is practiced. They include: • Wetland agriculture; • Intensive farming; • Commercial agriculture; • Plantation agriculture and so on. Now let us look at all of them in detail. All of the types covered are majorly practiced in rural areas, although some form of them might also be practiced in the urban areas. 2.3.1. Shifting Agriculture Shifting cultivation is a type of farming in which a patch of land is first cleared of all vegetation. Then it is cultivated for some years, and then it is abandoned. A new area is then selected for further cultivation until the fertility of the land left is restored naturally (Figure 2.12). Introduction to Rural Agriculture 45 Figure 2.12: A patch of land being burnt in Manmao, Arunachal Pradesh, India as a part of shifting cultivation. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shifting_cultivation_Swid-den_Slash_Burn_Manmao_IMG_9115.jpg 2.3.2.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Geographies of Agriculture

  Globalisation, Restructuring and Sustainability

  • Guy Robinson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2   The changing focus of agricultural geography

  2.1  ‘Traditional’ agricultural geography

  This chapter focuses on how the content of agricultural geography has evolved post-1945, thereby providing a context for the more extended consideration of key components of agricultural change in the rest of the book. Emphasis is placed upon how there has been a move from a ‘traditional’ form of agricultural geography to new approaches embracing different ideas from across the social sciences.

  A standard definition of agricultural geography in the mid-1980s referred to ‘the description and explanation of spatial variations in agricultural activity over the earth’s surface’ (Ilbery, 1985a, p. 1). This interpretation was based largely on consideration of two major avenues of enquiry that had dominated agricultural geography in the twentieth century:

  •   Location and context, in which emphasis was placed on the regional characteristics of agricultural activities, especially broad trends and tendencies (Coppock, 1968; 1971).

  •   Explanations of agriculture’s great diversity, through consideration of relationships between the large number of relevant variables associated with social, economic, physical and historical factors affecting agriculture (e.g. Grigg, 1992a).

  The regional focus in the first of these can be traced to the first time that a specialism specifically termed ‘agricultural geography’ played a leading role in the development of geography as an academic discipline. This was in the 1920s when agricultural geography was one of the principal specialisms that emerged as part of the growth of regional geography as the discipline’s central paradigm (Johnston, 1997, pp. 44–52). An example of this was Baker’s (1926) work on the recognition of ‘agricultural regions’ in different parts of the world. The region became the central focus of study for agricultural geographers, with both singleattribute and multi-attribute regions being recognised. Indeed, for the first half of the twentieth century agricultural geography involved regional delimitations following large-scale mapping of distributions of crops and livestock (e.g. Robertson, 1930) and the classification of agricultural systems (e.g. Whittlesey, 1936). Prevailing ideas on environmental determinisim emphasised the physical controls exerted upon the nature of agricultural activity. Description of agricultural variations was important, with land-use mapping of significance in some countries, a good example being the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain, begun in the 1930s by the geographer L. D. Stamp (1948).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Visualizing Human Geography

  At Home in a Diverse World

  • Alyson L. Greiner(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  • Within the United States, dry-lot dairies have altered the geography of commercial dairy farming. Factory farms and feedlots are changing farming practices in mixed crop and livestock farming regions. Commercial grain farm- ing occurs in the temperate grassland regions of North and South America, Australia, and eastern Europe and Russia. The practice of livestock ranching, a type of extensive agriculture, tends to be spatially associated with regions that are drier and/or more remote from major markets, as in New Zealand (see photo). Extensive agriculture • Figure 9.15 Todd Gipstein/NG Image Collection • The von Thünen model helps to depict the relationship between location, or nearness to the market, and how land is used for commercial agriculture. 3 Agriculture, the Environment, and Globalization 256 • All Types of Agriculture transform the environment. The nature and extent of the impact on the environment differs from place to place and from farmer to farmer. Soil degradation and the impacts of climate change are serious issues that all farmers confront. Desertification, whether caused by hu- man or climatic factors, can reduce agricultural productivity. Irrigation can lead to salinization. • Sustainable agriculture and organic agriculture have developed in response to concerns about the adverse im- pacts that commercial farming can have on the environment. Although precision agriculture was not developed strictly for reasons of sustainability, some aspects of it support the careful management of resources. • The second agricultural revolution began in Europe dur- ing the Middle Ages and was prolonged because of devel- opments during the Industrial Revolution. Innovations that made the second agricultural revolution possible include the development of the moldboard plow, the horse collar, and the four-course system of crop rotation. • The third agricultural revolution began in the 20th century and is still underway.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Agriculture in the Third World

  A Spatial Analysis

  • W. B. Morgan(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4Agricultural regions in the Third World

  In the more developed countries agricultural regions are mostly seen as areas of specialization in the production of a particular farm enterprise or group of enterprises; spectacularly so in the United States, where, as early as the 1920s, huge areas of major crop or livestock production concentration were generally recognized and more formally defined by O. E. Baker (1926–32). Agricultural regions are not discrete objects totally integrating all the phenomena lying within their bounds, nor do they necessarily possess a very high degree of homogeneity of some combination of phenomena, nor are they the inevitable product of the operation of ‘natural laws’. They are a convenient way of dividing and classifying space with respect to certain phenomena in order to create a simplified picture of the spatial patterning of agricultural activity (Morgan and Munton, 1971, pp. 126–8). They are essentially an intellectual concept (Whittlesey, 1954) or the product of imagination, but based on real facts of spatial concentration interpreted by partial and sometimes indirect measures of varying degrees of accuracy. Frequently they do contain distinctive landscape features, more especially distinctive patterns of land use, field systems and settlement, but there are few instances of even approximate exclusive co-variation of three or more phenomena of agricultural significance. Significantly, the regions include many features displayed elsewhere and their key criteria are often represented in other locations. Few of them are the product of some centrally-directed plan; most have resulted from the similar decisions of large numbers of farmers living near to one another. We may therefore see many regions as the result not just of particular combinations of factors for which a certain enterprise or particular form of agricultural activity provided a preferred or supposedly optimal farming choice, but as the result of a particular spread or diffusion of information, advice and example. Agricultural regions may be seen to increase or decrease in size, to change their degree of concentration of a particular enterprise or even apparently to move across country. They may also change in shape, split into a number of discrete areas or fuse a number of separate areas together. Although we cannot for the most part identify a particular decision-maker such as a farmer or a government minister with them, as we can with the farm or the nation, nevertheless these are important areal units for consideration in any agricultural study, for they are the product of particular patterns of decision-making, of flows of information and of other spatial systems such as networks of social relationships, of transport and of marketing. They are the spatial expression of organized agricultural activity.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Feeding the World

  An Economic History of Agriculture, 1800-2000

  • Giovanni Federico(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Two WHY IS AGRICULTURE DIFFERENT? 2.1 Introduction The relationship with environment has always been a distinctive feature of agriculture, but its nature has changed deeply in the recent decades. 1 The current worries about the impact of agriculture on the environment would have greatly surprised a nineteenth-century American farmer, and probably an Indian one in the present day, too. The experience led them to consider nature as an enemy: he had to fight for survival against pests, weather, and diseases with inadequate tools and poor knowledge. Agricultural land itself is a product of human ingenuity: generations have toiled to convert marshes, forests, and prairies into fields and meadows. Indeed, most land is unsuitable for agriculture, as map 1 shows. Even nowadays, at the end of a long period of expansion, agriculture uses some 1.7 bil-lion hectares for arable and tree crops, plus 3.5 billion hectares for pasture—out of 13 billion hectares total landmass. 2 The stock could indeed be augmented with suitable (huge) investments and/or the sacrifice of most remaining forests. 3 How-ever, even in most optimistic assessments, about 50 to 60 percent of the total land-mass will remain unfit for agricultural purposes, barring some spectacular and so far unpredictable technological breakthrough. This is, in itself, a powerful envi-ronmental constraint. But the environment constrains not only where but also what and when it is possible to cultivate, and thereby determines output. The next section will outline these constraints, while section 3 will focus on the relationship between land endowment and the characteristics of agriculture. 2.2 Agriculture and the Environment: An Uneasy Relationship The environment, in the widest meaning of the word, affects agriculture in four different ways: 1. The environment determines what is possible to cultivate. Each plant or ani-mal has an ideal habitat, which depends on several conditions that interact in a very complex way.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming

  Population, Food and Family

  • James W. Wood(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Another thing held in common by all subsistence farmers (indeed, by farmers of every stripe) is that they are faced with the same set of basic resource management problems – water, soils, time, space, household labor, crop genetic resources, etc. The specifics of the problems vary widely from place to place and even from farm to farm in the same locality, as do the particular practices adopted to deal with them, but the basic problems are always and everywhere the same. Before exploring the resource management problems faced by subsistence farmers, we need to discuss a conventional but historically important approach to the diver- sity of traditional, subsistence-oriented farming practices – the construction of typologies of traditional farming “systems.” The typological approach, which is still common in anthropology and geography, has, I believe, been a source of some misunderstanding when applied to the debate on population and agriculture, and I introduce it mainly to exorcise it. Typological Approaches to the Diversity of Subsistence Farming Practices The classic way to try to capture the diversity of traditional farming is to force it into a typology, i.e. a small number of stereotypic agricultural “systems” (see, for example, Dumont, 1957; Duckham and Masefield, 1969; Ruthenberg, 1971; Grigg, 1974; Norman, 1979; Turner and Brush, 1987). Typologies can be useful as a first way to organize a large body of empirical observations, but they can also distort reality to such an extent that they hinder rather than help understanding. Some typologies are “natural” in that the barriers between “types” are real. At least at the 42 Farmers, Farms and Farming Resources species level, biological taxonomies are an obvious example owing to the reproduct- ive isolation separating most species, especially among animals (plants and microbes are altogether more promiscuous).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book