Unit 5 Vocab Flashcards
To grow enough food or raise enough livestock to meet the immediate needs of the farmer and his or her family.
Subsistence Practices
To grow enough crops or raise enough livestock to sell for profit.
Commercial Farming
Farmers or ranchers use large amounts of inputs, such as energy, fertilizers, labor, or machines, to maximize yields.
Intensive Agriculture
Type of subsistent extensive agriculture practiced in arid and semi-arid climates around the world. Nomads rely on animals for survival.
Pastoral Nomadism
A farming practice where farmers clear a plot of land, cultivate crops for a few years until the soil becomes depleted, and then move on to a new area, allowing the previously used land to regenerate naturally during a fallow period. This is a type of subsistent extensive agriculture.
Shifting Cultivation
A large-scale commercial farming practice that involves growing a single crop for sale.
Plantation Agriculture
An agricultural practice where farmers cultivate crops and raise livestock on the same farm.
Mixed Crop/Livestock Systems
The small-scale production of fruits, vegetables, and flowers as cash crops sold directly to local consumers.
Market Gardening
Refers to a method of land surveying that defines property boundaries by using natural features like rivers, roads, or other landmarks, along with precise distances and directions, to create a detailed description of a parcel of land, particularly useful for irregularly shaped plots that don’t fit into a grid system; “metes” signifying the measured distances, and “bounds” representing the identifiable natural or man-made features that mark the property lines.
Metes and Bounds System
Refers to a system of land surveying used in the United States, where land is divided into a grid of square “townships” (typically six miles by six miles) and further subdivided into smaller, one-square-mile “sections,” creating a highly organized pattern for land distribution and settlement.
Township and Range
The origin of farming. Marked by the domestication of plants and animals.
Neolithic (First) Agricultural Revolution
First major hearth of agriculture, located in Southwest Asia.
Fertile Crescent
Global movement of plants and animals between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas.
Columbian Exchange
Began in the 1700’s, used the advances of the Industrial Revolution to increase food supplies and support population growth. Agriculture benefited from mechanization, improved knowledge of fertilizers, soils, and selective breeding practices for plants and animals.
Second Agricultural Revolution
Process of applying controlled amounts of water to crops.
Irrigation
A period of significant agricultural advancements, primarily between the 1940s and 1970s, where new technologies like high-yield crop varieties, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and improved irrigation systems were introduced to rapidly increase food production globally, particularly in developing countries, aiming to alleviate hunger issues; often associated with the work of Norman Borlaug, considered the “father of the Green Revolution.”
Green Revolution
The process of breeding two plants that have desirable characteristics to produce a single seed with both characteristics.
Hybridization of seeds
Humans using engineering techniques to change the DNA of a seed.
GMOs
Shows that as one moves away from the central business district, the price of land decreases. This relationship means that businesses which depend on high foot traffic or quick access to customers will pay more to be located near the CBD.
Bid-Rent Theory
The practice of cultivating and raising aquatic organisms like fish, shellfish, and algae in controlled environments, essentially considered “farming in water,” as opposed to catching wild fish through commercial fishing.
Aquaculture
An increase in efficiency to lower the per-unit production cost, resulting in greater profits.
Economies of Scale
A process used by corporations to gather resources, transform them into goods, and then transport them to consumers.
Commodity Chains
The number of people that U.S. farmers can support given the available resources.
Carrying Capacity
An economic model that suggested a pattern for the types of products that farmers would produce at different positions relative to the market where they sold their goods.
von Thunen Model
A global movement that aims to ensure producers in developing countries receive fair prices for their goods, promoting sustainable practices and economic equity by guaranteeing better working conditions and wages, often focusing on agricultural products, while challenging traditional trade practices that can exploit farmers and workers.
Fair Trade
Alteration of the natural vegetation in arid areas causes fertile land to become infertile.
Desertification
Farmers build a series of steps into the side of a hill.
Terrace Farming
An agricultural technique where farmers clear land for cultivation by cutting down vegetation and then burning it, creating a temporary field to grow crops, often associated with shifting cultivation where farmers move to a new plot after a few years to allow the land to regenerate.
Slash and Burn
When farmers process their crops into high-value products, rather than simply selling it as it comes from the field.
Value-Added Farming
A farming model where consumers purchase shares of a farm’s harvest in advance, essentially providing the farmer with upfront capital while securing fresh produce for themselves throughout the growing season; it represents a direct connection between consumers and local producers, sharing the risks and benefits of food production.
Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA)
When households lack access to adequate food because of limited money or other resources.
Food Insecurity
A neighborhood where residents have little to no access to healthy and affordable food.
Food Desert
The variety of life forms present on Earth, encompassing the different species, genetic variations within those species, and the ecosystems they inhabit.
Biodiversity
Refers to the use of living organisms, like cells and genes, to develop products and processes that can improve human life, often applied in agriculture through genetic modification to create crops with desired traits, like pest resistance or increased yield, also known as GMOs
Biotechnology
The process by which humans selectively breed and cultivate wild plants and animals to develop traits that are beneficial for human use, essentially transforming them from wild species into forms that can be reliably utilized for food, labor, or companionship, marking a key step in the development of agriculture.
Domestication
Local food (or locavore) movements aim to connect food producers and consumers in the same geographic region, to develop more self-reliant and resilient food networks, improve local economies, or to affect the health, environment, community, or society of a particular place.
Local-Food Movements
A type of subsistence agriculture where people move their livestock seasonally across large areas in search of fresh pasture and water, essentially following migratory patterns to find the best grazing land for their animals, often practiced in arid and semi-arid regions with limited arable land.
Nomadic Herding
Reluctance to use biotechnology in farming.
Organic Agriculture
Occurs when soil in an arid climate has been made available for agricultural production using irrigation.
Soil Salinization
The use of Earth’s resources in ways that ensure their availability in the future.
Sustainability
