Geography Two - Agricultural Systems

[Bhalla Changa]

AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS

INTRODUCTION

The factors of production are brought together in agriculture in varying proportions and in different ways, cropping is adjusted to physical conditions and physical conditions may be modified to suit crops. The result has been the creation of Agricultural Systems, or ways in which these elements – labor, capital and land – are combined in order to produce crops and rear livestock. Each system is immensely complex. Inputs of labor and capital vary greatly. Crops are associated in joint production. One agriculture product may serve as an input in another branch of the same system; for instance, fodder crops, grown in rotation with corn, help to feed dairy cattle.

CHANGES IN SYSTEMS

It is usually simple to make substitutions within a system. For example, to grow sorghum instead of maize, or to use soybeans instead of a fallow (left unplanted). Indeed, any farmer regularly makes a choice between available crops, deciding which to put in a particular slot in his agricultural system. Such a choice may necessitate minor changes in the system, in the date of sowing or harvesting, perhaps, or in the use of fertilizer. But the system is not dislocated thereby, and the change can be and often is reversed. But drastic changes in a system can introduce substantial difficulties, because modifications in one part usually bring about changes in other. Peasant societies rarely make such a change unless compelled to do so. Even a change such as that from dairy to beef farming imposes a strain on the system, and few farmers choose to face the resulting disorientation unless driven by severe economic necessity.

IMPORTANT AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS

Every agricultural system represents an adjustment to climatic conditions and it is convenient to group the more important systems practiced in the world today according to the physical conditions in which they are carried on.

1. Tropical and Equatorial Agricultural Systems

The inter-tropical areas of the earth’s surface are characterized by great heat, a seasonal range of temperature which is negligible on the equator, and a rainfall whose incidence and distribution varies widely. The agricultural economies are adjusted in varying degrees to their physical conditions; they differ also in the ways in which skills and techniques, capital and labor are represented in their management and organization.

i. Primitive Shifting Agriculture
This agricultural system has received an attention from geographers and anthropologists out of all proportions to its slight economic importance today. It continues to be practised, mainly in equatorial regions, by primitive subsistence farmers. They cultivate a small patch of land with crops such as yams, cassava, and sorghum until its natural fertility is exhausted. They then abandon it and make another clearing, which they cultivate until it too looses its fertility. Such cultivators use only the simplest methods, and very rarely produce for the markets. They have few or no animals, and their frequent movements restrict the volume of goods that they can posses.

ii. Tropical Peasant Farming
This system makes a more effective and continuous use of the land. It is found throughout the inter-tropical world. The peasants cultivate holdings, which may range in size from one to a dozen or so hectares with crops such as millet, sorghum, rice, groundnuts, cassava and yams. Although they may leave a small area fallow for a time, their settlements are permanent and their holdings change little if at all. They may produce small amounts of groundnuts, cacao or palm oil for the market, though this depends on transport and marketing facilities. In many areas where this system is practised, there is scope for improving methods of cultivation and for increasing its marketable surplus.

iii. Plantation Agriculture
The plantation represents the intrusion (forced entrance) of a western style of Capitalist Organization into tropical agriculture. The agricultural unit is large; it usually concentrates on a single crop, such as rubber, cacao, hemp, coffee or tea and is worked with hired labor. It represents a large capital investment. Its crops – frequently tree crops – take many years to mature, and often require careful processing before marketing. The plantation is usually an efficient method of production but its concentration on one crop may harm the soil while the fact that it is usually subject to foreign control, and is infact a kind of imperialism likely to raise political problems.

iv. Monsoon Agriculture
This is, in reality, a special case of Tropical Peasant Agriculture. Its particular circumstances are the concentration of rainfall, sometimes very heavy, into a short rainy season. It is characterized by intensive, irrigated cultivation of rice during the hot, wet season, except where this is precluded (prevented) by the terrain. It is common for a dry season crop to be taken after the rice harvest, and sometimes even a third crop in spring. Monsoon agriculture is capable of supporting a very dense population, and south, south-east and East Asia have the densest rural populations to be found anywhere in the world. Limits are set to monsoon agriculture by increasing cold and diminishing rainfall, and monsoon peasant agriculture disappears against the arid mountains and plateaus of the interior of Asia.

2. Mid Latitude Agricultural System

In the agricultural regions, discussed above, most of the population is rural and is directly dependent on cultivating the soil for its livelihood. Though, Japan and parts of China have, in modern times, become urbanized and industrialized, and an urban market has thus developed for farm products, elsewhere in these countries subsistence agriculture predominates. In the temperate areas of the earth, on the other hand, very large urban and industrialized societies have developed during the last 150 years, and the demand they create is a great and sometimes dominant factor in agricultural organization and production.
The agriculture of temperate lands is divided arbitrarily into three types, but these are extremely difficult to separate from one another either spatially or on the basis of their organization.

i. Mediterranean Agriculture
The Mediterranean region is the most distinctive of the major climatic regions of the world, and has evolved a distinct agricultural system that has changed little in 2000 years. Rainfall comes mainly in winter, and the hot summer is generally a period of drought, when plant growth ceases unless irrigation is practised. In some Mediterranean areas, irrigation from rivers permits the cultivation through the summer of such crops as maize and cotton. The period of drought, coinciding with that of greatest heat, prevents the growth of grass and fodder crops, except in favored localities.
Corn crops are winter-sown and ripen during the dry summer, spring sown crops are excluded by summer drought. Maize and winter-sown barley and wheat are grown, but are not, in general, of much importance.
Although in many parts of the Southern Europe a subsistence agriculture is practised, it is found, in most areas having a Mediterranean climate, that it is more profitable not to grow grain foods instead to concentrate on fruit production. There is a heavy dependence on tree crops such as olives and grapes, which are able to survive and even flourish in the dry season. In this, the regions of Mediterranean climate have considerable advantage. In the extra-European regions, fruit growing on a quasi-plantation basis is a normal activity. In Europe, fruit growing for export is combined in varying proportions with subsistence agriculture on small holdings.
In the absence of imported food stuff, animal husbandry is of slight importance, and where it is carried on, has had usually to become transhumance (migration).
It is, infact, another manifestation (indication, display) of peasant agriculture, and it is characterized in varying degrees by the smallness and fragmentation of holdings, the lack of capital, the over population, conditions which are common to peasant agriculture throughout the world. Conditions, however, differ in the areas of California, South Africa and Australia, which experience this types of climate. Here, an organization more nearly akin (related) to that of plantation agriculture has been evolved. Fruit, vine, olive oil and related products suited to the Mediterranean climate are produced for export.

ii. Mixed Farming of North-West Europe & the North-Eastern US
The farming patterns in these areas are dominated by the presence of large urban markets. Subsistence farming is not important and most of the farm products are sold off the farms to the nearby towns. The large and still growing demand for food stuff has set a premium on intensive production. The high yields thus obtained have encouraged a rise in land values and this increase brings about even more intensive use of land. In general, the intensity of land use diminishes with the increase in the effective distance from the towns. As the time and cost of transport to the town market increases, the more intensive dairy farming, vegetable and fruit growing and glass house cultivation tend to give place to mixed and arable forms of husbandry.
In north-western Europe, this highly complex pattern of agriculture has evolved during the past two centuries from one which was at once simpler and more self sufficient, and less dependent on urban markets. In general, it is intensive and highly capitalized, though there remains many areas of relatively backward farming. The organization of agriculture varies from a predominance of dairy farming in moisture areas and close to large cities, to arable farming which concentrates on “cash grains”, grains sold off the land directly to the buyer. Between these extremes is the true mixed agriculture, in which arable farming provides the fodder for sheep and cattle.

iii. Europe Peasant Farming
This is distinguishable from mixed farming, which in some ways it resembles, in being largely subsistence, with only a small dependence on the market. It was once wide spread in Europe and was not unknown in eastern North America. The peasant holding was commonly small, fragmented and under-equipped. It yielded only a small livelihood, and is today giving place to commercially organized mixed farming. The peasant remains of great importance, however, in parts of central and Eastern Europe, notably in Poland and former Yugoslavia.

3. Dry Land Agricultural Systems

Dry lands occupy the interiors of most continents. Intensive use of land is, in general, precluded (prevented) by the lack of moisture, and the predominant forms of land use are ranching and commercial grain cultivation.

i. Ranching (Cattle Breeding)
This is today confined to the more arid margins of the temperate grasslands. It has already lost much of the exotic coloring and romantic appeal of the last century and is now under pressure from the encroachment of arable farming. The ranching areas of USA, Australia and Canada now breed cattle, which are sent in large numbers to be fattened in the arable farming areas.

ii. Commercial Grain Farming
Large areas of mid latitude grasslands are given over to the cultivation of a single crop, most often wheat. Wheat is the predominant crop over great tracks of the North American and Soviet grasslands, as well as on those of Australia, South Africa and South America. Farming is, generally speaking, highly mechanized but does not make intensive use of the land. There is a tendency for rotational farming, which makes a much more intensive use of the land to encroach on the region of commercial grain agriculture wherever the amount of rainfall is adequate.

iii. Arctic and Sub-Arctic Regions
These regions can scarcely be said to have agricultural systems. The climate nearly everywhere is too severe for agriculture, and cultivation is practicable only in a few well favored spots. Mixed farming does, however, tend to encroach on these regions, added by the development by the plant breeders of quickly growing species.