AGRICULTURE BASICS
SETTLEMENT & SURVEY
THE AG REVOLUTIONS
PRODUCTION REGIONS
CONSEQUENCES
100
Farming that produces food primarily to feed the farmer's own family, with little surplus.
What is subsistence agriculture? MC TIP — Subsistence dominates the periphery; commercial agriculture dominates the core. That split drives most of the unit.
100
A settlement where farmhouses and services cluster together, with fields radiating outward.
What is a nucleated (clustered) settlement? MC TIP — Nucleated encourages cooperation and shared services. Dispersed settlements isolate farmsteads on their own land — the American Midwest pattern.
100
The domestication of plants and animals roughly 10,000 years ago, allowing permanent settlement.
What is the First (Neolithic) Agricultural Revolution? MC TIP — Its consequence is the big one: food surplus made cities, specialization, and social hierarchy possible.
100
The intensive commercial farming of fruits, vegetables, and flowers for nearby urban markets.
What is market gardening (truck farming)? MC TIP — Market gardening is perishable and sits close to the city — the inner ring in von Thünen terms.
100
Plowing steep slopes into flat steps to farm hillsides without erosion.
What is terracing? MC TIP — Terracing is an environmental modification from Unit 1 — benefit plus unintended consequence earns the full point.
200
Farming that produces crops and livestock for sale on the market.
What is commercial agriculture? MC TIP — Commercial farming is capital-intensive, mechanized, and tied to agribusiness. Low agricultural density from Unit 2 is the fingerprint.
200
The U.S. survey system that divides land into a grid of one-mile-square sections.
What is the township-and-range (rectangular) survey system? MC TIP — It produces the checkerboard field pattern visible from an airplane over Iowa and the grid of rural roads.
200
The 17th-to-19th-century improvements in tools, crop rotation, and selective breeding that fed industrializing cities.
What is the Second Agricultural Revolution? MC TIP — It runs alongside the Industrial Revolution. More food plus fewer farm jobs equals rural-to-urban migration.
200
Large commercial farms in tropical regions producing a single cash crop like coffee, cocoa, or bananas.
What is plantation agriculture? MC TIP — Plantations are a colonial legacy, are export-oriented, and tie directly to dependency and world-systems theory in Unit 7.
200
Fertilizer and pesticide washing into rivers, causing algal blooms and oxygen-starved dead zones.
What is agricultural runoff causing eutrophication? MC TIP — The Gulf of Mexico dead zone fed by the Mississippi is the standard example. Green Revolution inputs are the cause.
300
Agriculture using large amounts of labor or capital on a small area of land to maximize yield.
What is intensive agriculture? MC TIP — Intensive sits close to market. Extensive — ranching, shifting cultivation — uses lots of land with little input and sits far from market.
300
A survey system using natural features and landmarks to describe property boundaries, common in the eastern United States.
What is metes and bounds? MC TIP — Metes and bounds produces irregular, winding property lines. Township-and-range produces squares. Long lots produce narrow strips.
300
The mid-20th-century spread of high-yield seed varieties, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation.
What is the Green Revolution? MC TIP — Norman Borlaug, high-yield wheat and rice. Huge success in Mexico and South Asia; far weaker in sub-Saharan Africa. AP asks why.
300
The commercial farming of grain on vast, sparsely populated areas like the North American Great Plains.
What is extensive commercial grain farming? MC TIP — Low labor per acre, heavy machinery, and a location far from market because grain is nonperishable and cheap to ship.
300
An urban area with limited access to affordable, nutritious fresh food.
What is a food desert? MC TIP — Food deserts are a Unit 5 concept tested on a Unit 6 urban map. Cause: supermarket disinvestment plus limited transportation.
400
The clearing of land by cutting and burning vegetation, then farming it until fertility declines.
What is slash-and-burn (swidden) agriculture? MC TIP — It is a form of shifting cultivation, extensive and subsistence, practiced in tropical rainforests. Its cost is deforestation.
400
Narrow parcels running perpendicular to a river or road so each landowner gets water access — seen in Louisiana and Quebec.
What are long lots? MC TIP — Long lots are French colonial. The purpose is EQUITABLE ACCESS to the waterway, which is the credited explanation.
400
Genetically modified organisms, precision agriculture, and aquaculture belong to this current phase.
What is the Third Agricultural Revolution (biotechnology)? MC TIP — Precision agriculture is the direct Unit 1 callback — GPS and GIS varying inputs within a single field.
400
The commercial farming region defined by dairy, and the ring of land around a city where it is produced.
What is the milkshed? MC TIP — Refrigeration and better transport EXPANDED the milkshed. That is the classic example of technology overriding von Thünen's distance logic.
400
Farming without synthetic chemicals, often sold through local food movements and community-supported agriculture.
What is organic agriculture? MC TIP — The CED pairs it with local-food and value-added specialty crops as consumer-driven responses to industrial agriculture.
500
Herding domesticated animals across seasonal pastures in arid and semiarid regions.
What is pastoral nomadism? MC TIP — Transhumance is the seasonal version — moving herds between highland summer and lowland winter pasture. Both are extensive subsistence.
500
A linear settlement pattern stretching along a road, river, or canal.
What is a linear settlement? MC TIP — The three arrangement words from Unit 1 return: clustered, dispersed, linear. Use them by name on the FRQ.
500
The corporate system integrating seed, fertilizer, production, processing, and distribution into one commercial chain.
What is agribusiness? MC TIP — Vertical integration is the mechanism: one firm controls every step, which squeezes the independent family farm out.
500
The agricultural type characterized by warm winters, dry summers, and crops like grapes, olives, and citrus.
What is Mediterranean agriculture? MC TIP — It occurs in five world regions with the same climate: the Mediterranean basin, California, central Chile, South Africa's Cape, and southwestern Australia.
500
The conversion of productive drylands into desert through overgrazing, deforestation, and drought.
What is desertification? MC TIP — The Sahel is the CED example. Cause is human land use plus climate; effect is forced migration — a Unit 2 callback.
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