Environmental Problems, Their Causes, and Sustainability 1

Industrialized agricultureShifting cultivationPlantation agricultureNomadic herdingIntensive traditional agricultureNo agricultureFigure 14-2 Locations of the world’s principal types of food production. Excluding Antarctica and Greenland,agricultural systems cover almost one-third of the earth’s land surface.There are two major types of agricultural systems: industrializedand traditional. Industrialized agriculture,or high-input agriculture, uses large amounts of fossilfuel energy, water, commercial fertilizers, and pesticidesto produce single crops (monocultures) or livestockanimals for sale. Practiced on about a fourth of allcropland, mostly in developed countries (Figure 14-2),high-input industrialized agriculture has spread sincethe mid-1960s to some developing countries.Plantation agriculture is a form of industrializedagriculture used primarily in tropical developingcountries. It involves growing cash crops (such as bananas,coffee, soybeans, sugarcane, cocoa, and vegetables)on large monoculture plantations, mostly for salein developed countries.An increasing amount of livestock production indeveloped countries is industrialized. Large numbersof cattle are brought to densely populated feedlots,where they are fattened up for about 4 months beforeslaughter. Most pigs and chickens in developed countriesspend their lives in densely populated pens andcages and eat mostly grain grown on cropland.Traditional agriculture consists of two main types,which together are practiced by about 2.7 billion people(42% of the world’s people) in developing countriesand provide about a fifth of the world’s foodsupply. Traditional subsistence agriculture typicallyuses mostly human labor and draft animals to produceonly enough crops or livestock for a farm family’s survival.Examples of this very low-input type of agricultureinclude numerous forms of shifting cultivation intropical forests and nomadic livestock herding.In traditional intensive agriculture, farmers increasetheir inputs of human and draft labor, fertilizer,and water to get a higher yield per area of cultivatedland. They produce enough food to feed their familiesand to sell for income.Croplands, like natural ecosystems, provide importantecological and economic services listed in Figure14-3 (p. 276). Indeed, agriculture is the world’shttp://biology.brookscole.com/miller14275