Food for Thought: The Globalization of Agriculture

1. Food for Thought: The Globalization of Agriculture

2. Why is agriculture important? • Much of the world’s land is devoted to agriculture • Although only 2% of Americans are farmers, half of all families in LDCs earn a living by farming • Agriculture is a major contributor to environmental change in the form of pesticide and fertilizer runoff, soil erosion, freshwater depletion, damming of rivers for irrigation purposes and deforestation

4. First Agricultural Revolution • 8-14 thousand years ago • Humans first planted and harvested edible plants and domesticated wild animals • Early agricultural regions • Fertile Crescent, China, SE Asia, the Indus Valley, Ethiopian Highlands, West Africa, Andes Mountains, Central America • Innovations over the , millennia • Irrigation, plowing, fencing, terraces, fertilizing, division of labor

5. Second Agricultural Revolution • Began in Western Europe in the 1600s • Promoted higher yields per acre and per farmer • Fed growing urban populations • New ideas: crop rotation, increased use of fertilizers, improved collars for draft animals • After Industrial Revolution: introduction of tractors, reapers, threshers, and better transportation, storage and barbed wire fencing

6. Third Agricultural Revolution • Green Revolution: 1960s and continues today • Introduced and diffused hybrid strains of staple grains by cross-pollinating different native strains of grain • Miracle rice and wheat • Mature in shorter amount of time • Critics worry about the effects of “unnatural” crops on human health and other species

7. How to determine what should be grown where • Natural Environment • Culture • Economic

8. How are crops grown • Labor-intensive vs. capital-intensive agriculture • Intensive vs. extensive agriculture • Subsistence vs. commercial agriculture • Sedentary vs. nomadic forms of agriculture