Rural Geography
Throughout this unit you are going to look at three types of farming:
· Shifting cultivation (The Amazon basin)
· Intensive peasant farming (The Ganges valley)
· Commercial arable farming (Great plains)
You will learn the following about each topic:
· What the farming involves?
· Where the farming occurs?
· That farm as a system
· The impacts of the farming methods used
· Changes that have occurred in that type of farming
· The implications of these changes
· Settlements typical of this type of farming
Introduction
Farming has been occurring throughout the world for thousands of years. Different areas of the world will be involved in different types of farming. This may be due to the different landscapes found throughout the world but it is also influenced by the social and economic factors as well.
Through out this unit it is important that you understand the key terminology to do with rural geography. To help you with this there is a key word list, which you can refer to throughout the topic.
Terminology list
Extensive Farming - Farming with relatively low input levels, especially of fertilizers, sprays, and pharmaceuticals. Larger areas per farm and per farmer may compensate for lower yields per hectare; so acceptable income levels may still be achieved.
Intensive Farming - is an agricultural production system characterized by the high inputs of capital, fertilizers, labour, or labor-saving technologies such as pesticides relative to land area.
Commercial - The production of crops for sale, crops intended for widespread distribution (e.g. supermarkets), and any non-food crops such as cotton and tobacco. Commercial agriculture includes livestock production and livestock grazing. Commercial agriculture does not include crops grown for household consumption
Subsistence - is self-sufficient farming in which farmers grow only enough food to feed the family, pay taxes or feudal dues. The typical subsistence farm has a range of crops and animals needed by the family to eat during the year.
Sedentary – This is farming that occurs in the same location all the time.
Hectare - a unit of area equal to 10,000 square metres. Roughly around the size of a large football pitch.
Arable farming – Growing of cereals, vegetables and animal feeds.
Soil Aggregate – Soil is made up of unit known as aggregates these help form the structure of the soil
Aggregate stability – This refers to the ability of the soil to resist disruption from outside forces such as water. Soils with a poor aggregate stability will be most likely to be eroded.
Cash crops - A crop which is grown for money.
DEFRA - Department for environment, food and rural affairs.
Inputs - The things that you put in to a farm. These can be human or physical inputs.
Outputs – The things that come out of a farm. This will be dependent upon the type of farming.
Processes - The activities that take place on a farm
Shifting cultivation
What is shifting cultivation?
The cycle of shifting cultivation
1) Making a clearing - The tribe first selects a small patch of rainforest. To create a clearing on the forest, the tribe selectively slashes the natural vegetation by simple tools and burns the logs,so the nutrients are released as ash, which dissolves and is washed by rain into the soil as natural fertilizers.
2) Growing Crops. A variety of food crops are grown on the land such as rice, maize, and cassava. The crops grow very quickly, some are ready to harvest after four to six months. After 2 or 3 years, due to decline in soil fertility, the yield of successive crops declines and weeds grows extensively
3) Abandoning the Clearing. The site is abandoned and cultivation moves to another site, where another patch of the rainforest will be cleared for a new swidden. They will try not to return to the former clearings for at least 50 years.
Impacts of farming
The Amazon rainforest is a vast area of land, which can be used for shifting cultivation, however as cultivation is done by hand only small areas of land will be cultivated at any one time.
The methods used to farm the land do not cause damage so it is a sustainable form of agriculture.
Soil in the tropical rainforests is very nutrient poor. The topsoil is only one to two inches (2.5 to 5 centimetres) deep. The only reason plant life is so lush is because the plants store the nutrients in themselves rather than getting them from the soil. When plants decay, other growing plants tap the nutrients from the dead matter and reuse nutrients left over from that plant. The cycle of decay in the rainforest is very rapid due to the warm moist conditions, which encourage bacterial decay.
Globally, shifting cultivation is estimated to clear between 20 and 60 million hectares (ha) of forest and scrub each year, and then burn between 1 and 2 billion tonnes of dry matter, thus contributing to global air pollution. It therefore might be argued that while on a micro-scale, shifting cultivation is sustainable; overall it may not be environmentally friendly.
Changes
Shifting cultivation has come under pressure as the demands being placed on the rainforests have increased. These demands have meant that the rainforests are being cleared as the numbers of economic activities have increased. This has lead to a reduction in the total area of tropical rainforests.
Vast areas have been cleared for:
· Extracting minerals like iron ore and bauxite
· Building roads such as the trans-Amazonian highway
· Extracting timber for tropical hardwoods like mahogany
· Developing settlements such as Carajas
· Building dams to create large lakes to produce hydro-electric power (H.E.P.)
· Two types of farming - cattle ranching on a vast scale and subsistence farming by incoming colonists working small units which are sponsored by the government
Implications of change
Impact on the landscape
· Large areas of cleared land are now open to the heavy rains.
· Deforestation breaks the humus cycle. Nutrients are rapidly leached out of the soil, leaving it infertile.
· Soil erosion leads to silting up of rivers, resulting in flooding.
· The loss of wildlife habitats reduces biodiversity.
Impact on the people
There has been a huge reduction in the number of native Amerindians in Amazonia, both by killings and by the introduction of 'Western' diseases. Tribal lands have been taken over and this has forced tribes, like the Kayapo, deeper into the more inaccessible forest. The alternatives for the Amerindians are to live on reservations or move to shantytowns in large urban areas.
The overall population density has, however, increased as people have moved into the rainforest for farming and other related jobs.
Impact on the way of life
With enough land and a low enough population density, shifting cultivation is a sustainable type of farming, however, the reduction in land available and the increased population density in Amazonia have had a huge impact on the traditional shifting cultivation way of life.
This leads to an unsustainable cycle, which can be seen in the box below
Intensive peasant farming
Impacts of farming
Problems
· Flooding – provides water and fertile silt to grow the rice but sometimes disaster strikes when the floods are so severe that they destroy the rice crop.
· Drought – in some years the monsoon rains 'fail' and the rice crop is ruined.
· Shortage of land and a growing population – many farms are too small to support the family. The ever-increasing population makes the situation worse. Food shortages are a real problem.
· Little use of machinery or modern methods.
· Farm holdings are broken up into tiny plots and spread over a wide area. This makes efficient farming difficult.
· The majority of the best farmland is held by a few wealthy landowners.
Changes
The green revolution
This saw the collective introduction of high yield varieties of crops, the use of fertilisers and irrigation. This provided the increase in production needed to make India self-sufficient in food grains. he program was started with the help of the United States-based Rockefeller Foundation and was based on high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and other grains that had been developed in Mexico and in the Philippines.
The introduction of irrigation means that two crops can be grown in a year now.
It was so successful in terms of production increases that it defied the gloomy Malthusian predictions of the 1960s, which said hundreds of millions would starve as population outstripped farm output.
Impacts of changes
New breeds of crops have been developed to increase yields two to four times, to shorten the time required for growth such that more than one crop a year can be produced, and to produce a plant which can withstand extremes of climate or disease. The use of Mexican wheat has doubled yields in the Punjab, and HYV rice has done the same so that imports are no longer necessary.
There have been drawbacks, however. The grain may not be as palatable or as attractive in appearance as the grain it replaces, and it may use up more energy to process. Seeds have to be bought, as the hybrids are not self-fertile, and some varieties are less resistant to drought and disease. Heavy applications of expensive fertilizers and insecticides are required and these are often made from non-renewable resources.
Herbicides are required because the fertilizer stimulates weed growth as well as crop growth. The high yields and reliance on artificial fertilizers can lead to impoverished soils. Traditional rice exporters, like India have seen the collapse of their markets. Increased yields mean that landowners can use their holdings more profitably and this often means that tenants are dispossessed this has led to a rise unemployment and migration to already over crowded cities.
Copious, but strictly regulated, irrigation is required.
1)
Resource sheet A
Farming as a system
If you look at diagram 1 it shows that throughout the world there is a wide range of farming going on. Farming can be extensive or intensive, it can involve animals or crops and it can be shifting or sedentary. Despite all of these variations of farming, they all have one thing in common; they are a system made up of inputs, outputs and processes.
Farming is greatly influenced by the landscape in which it is based and the physical environment (the atmosphere, biosphere and lithosphere) plays an important role in determining what type of farming can be done in an area. Therefore it is important to understand the physical inputs in an area.
The type of farming that is done will affect the human inputs, processes and outputs in farming so that these may vary between different types of farming.
Below is a table that outlines the factors that would make up a farming system.
Inputs / Processes / OutputsPhysical / Human / Arable / Pastoral
Climate
Soil
Relief
Aspect / Availability of labour
Accessibility to Market
Cost of land
Tradition
Demand for products / Ploughing
Harvesting
Weeding / Grazing
Shearing
Milking / Crops
Animals
Animal products