Agriculture Terms
A plant that is deliberately planted, protected, cared for, and used by humans and is genetically distinct from its wild ancestors
What is a domesticated plant?
A center where innovations or new practices develop and from which the innovations or new practices spread or diffuse
What is a hearth?
A machine for planting seeds in a row
What is the seed drill?
The cultivation of a single commercial crop on extensive tracts of land
What is monocropping?
These crops were grown directly adjacent to the Urban Center
What are Dairy & Produce?
Crop cultivation and livestock rearing systems that require little hired labor or monetary investment to successfully raise crops and animals
What is extensive agriculture?
The period during which the early domestication and diffusion of plants and animals and the cultivation of seed crops led to the development of agriculture
What is the First Agricultural Revolution?
The period that brought improved methods of cultivation, harvesting, and storage of farm produce that began in the late 1600s and continued through the 1930s
What is the Second Agricultural Revolution?
A series of links connecting a commodity’s many places of production, distribution, and consumption
What is a commodity chain?
This product was raised further from the Urban Center, as while alive it was not perishable
What are livestock?
Food production mainly for consumption by the farming family and local community, rather than principally for sale in the market
What is subsistence agriculture?
A site of the earliest domestication of plants and herd animals
What is the Indus River Valley?
Materials used to kill or repel animals or insects that can damage, destroy, or inhibit crop growth
What are pesticides?
A large corporation that provides a vast array of goods and services to support the agricultural industry
What is an agribusiness?
This non-perishable product was grown and harvested relatively close to the Urban Center due to its difficulty and expense to transport
What is Timber?
The cultivation of a plot of land until it becomes less productive, typically over a period of about 3 to 5 years
What is shifting cultivation?
The interaction and widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, disease, and ideas between the Americas, West Africa, and the Old World in the 15th and 16th centuries
What is the Columbian Exchange?
Industrially manufactured nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, made from petroleum byproducts
What are synthetic fertilizers?
An animal rearing system that confines livestock in high density cages only large enough to allow the animal’s body to grow and to accommodate equipment for feeding and waste removal
What is a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO)?
This product was grown via extensive farming at a substantial distance outside of the Urban Center
What are grains and cereals?
A system of breeding and rearing herd livestock, such as cattle, sheep, or goats, by following the seasonal movement of rainfall to areas of open pasturelands
What is nomadic herding, or pastoralism?
The earliest center for domestication of seed plants
What is the Fertile Crescent?
Materials designed to kill or inhibit the growth of unwanted plants (weeds) that compete with crops
What are herbicides?
This explains how the demand for and price of land decrease as its distance from the central business district increases
What is bid-rent theory?
Von Thunen assumed that all land was flat and that the physical environment was the same everywhere - a concept referred to as this
What is the Isotropic Plane?