10.4.1 Overview of Agricultural Practices

The most fundamental way to categorize types of agriculture is as follows:

• Subsistence agriculture – food is produced for family consumption with some surplus to be sold at local markets and
• Commercial agriculture – food is produced for sale.

Within these two categories, there are additional types of agriculture, including:

• Subsistence agriculture
  • slash-and-burn agriculture
  • shifting cultivation
  • intensive subsistence
  • pastoral nomadism
  • transhumance
• Commercial agriculture
  • plantations (mostly in formerly colonized countries)
  • agribusiness
  • specialized agriculture (orchards, tree-farming, market gardening etc).

Each type of agriculture employs distinct methods and procedures. Another way agricultural methods vary is through intensification, which refers to the amount of agricultural output per unit of land. Agricultural methods can range from extensive to intensive or from having low human inputs with productive outputs to having high human inputs with  productive outputs. Generally, societies tend to adopt more intensive practices over time to increase production per unit of land.

However, intensification of agriculture comes with significant drawbacks. Unlike hunter-gatherers, who may need only 2-3 days a week to gather their sustenance, agriculturalists must work 6-7 days a week to manage large plots of crops. This intensive labor demands greater effort and time. Additionally, agriculture can be quite fragile; a single major disaster or pestilence has the potential to wipe out a society’s primary food source, leading to severe shortages. Furthermore, reliance on a single crop can compromise nutritional health, as it may lead to malnutrition if the diet lacks diversity.

In contrast, there are innovative and creative methods to produce food that address some of these concerns. Aquaculture, for instance, involves cultivating food or animals in water environments, such as fish, cranberries, and hydroponic lettuce, which can be less vulnerable to land-based risks. Urban gardening offers another solution by allowing food production in urban settings rather than rural ones. Examples include growing a tomato plant on a front stoop or balcony, renting a community garden plot, or establishing rooftop gardens. These methods not only diversify food sources but also integrate food production into daily urban life.

10.4.2 Commercial Agriculture

Unlike the small subsistence farms (1-2 hectares/2-5 acres), the average of the commercial farm size is over 150 hectares/370 acres (178 ha/193 acres U.S.) and, being mechanized,
many of them are family owned and operated. Mechanization also determines the percentage of the labor force in agriculture, with many developed countries being even below two percent of the total employment, such as Israel, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Moreover, as the result of industrialization and urbanization, many higher income countries continue to lose significant areas of agricultural land. North America, for example, had 28.3 percent agricultural land out of the total land area in 1961 and 26 percent in 2014. The European Union decreased its agricultural land from 54.7 percent to 43.8 percent for the same period, during which some countries recorded outstanding decreases, such as Ireland from 81.9 to 64.8 percent, the United Kingdom from 81.8 to 71.2 percent, and Denmark from 74.6 to 62.2 percent to mention only a few. In addition to the high level of mechanization, in order to increase their productivity, commercial farmers use scientific advances in research and technology such as the Global Positioning System (autonomous precision seed-planting robot, intelligent systems for animal monitoring, savings in field vegetable-growing through the use of a GPS automatic steering system), and satellite imagery (finding efficient routes for selective harvesting based on remote sensing management).

Social critiques center on the economic system that farmers become a part of when they adopt Green Revolution technology. Traditional agriculture was largely self- contained. Farmers produced their inputs by saving seeds from previous harvests to plant next year, by collecting their natural fertilizers, and by using their household labor to till the fields. However, the improved seeds and the package of chemical inputs that make up the Green Revolution cannot be produced on the local farm. They have to be mass-produced by large agribusiness companies and then sold to farmers. Farmers then become dependent on companies like Monsanto to buy their inputs and sell their products. The contracts that farmers sign with these companies often put small farmers at a great disadvantage. Depending on the arrangements made by the farmers, they may then become highly dependent on the international agricultural market — meaning that global shifts in prices for both inputs and farm products can determine their ability to make ends meet.

If you are interested in this topic, watch this video:

10.4.3 Biotechnology and Agriculture

Since the 19th century, manipulation and management of biological organisms have been a key to the development of agriculture. In addition to Green Revolution, agriculture has also undergone a Biorevolution, involving agricultural biotechnology (agritech), an area of agricultural science involving the use of scientific tools and genetic engineering techniques to modify living organisms (or part of organisms) of plants and animals with the potential of outstripping the productivity increases of the Green Revolution and, at the same time, reducing
agricultural production costs. Within the agricultural biotechnology process, desired traits are exported from a particular s

pecies of crop or animal to the different species obtaining transgenic crops, which possess desirable characteristics in terms of flavor, color of flowers, growth rate, size of harvested products, and resistance to diseases and pests (BT corn, for example, can produce its own pesticides). By removing the genetic material from one organism and inserting it into the permanent genetic code of another, the biotech industry has created an astounding number of organisms that are not produced by nature. It has been estimated that upwards of 75 percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves – from soda to soup, crackers to condiments – contain genetically engineered ingredients. So far, little is known about the impacts of genetically modified (GM) foods on human health and the environment. Consequently, it is difficult to sort the benefits from the costs of their increasing incorporation into global food production. The United States is the leader not only for the number of the genetically engineered (GE) food crops but also for the largest areas planted with commercialized biotech crops. Many countries, in Europe, for example, consider that the genetic modificationhas not been proved safe, the reason for which they require all food to be labeled and refuse to import GM food. Yet, in the United States, genetic modification is permitted, taking into consideration that there is no evidence yet supporting that it is dangerous. Many people instead consider that they have the right to decide what they eat and, consequently, in their opinion, labeling of GM products must be mandatory. Protests against GMO regulatory structures have been very effective in many countries including the United States (Figure 10.4.1).

10.4.4 Organic Agriculture and its Worldwide Demand

An emerging trend in agriculture, which is in some ways opposed to but in other ways parallel to the Green Revolution, is the rise of organic agriculture. Organic agriculture is agriculture that avoids the use of “artificial” chemical inputs and genetically modified crops. The organics movement originated as an attempt to avoid the problems arising from the Green Revolution by creating a farming system that works in harmony with the land. This original vision of organic agriculture is reflected, for example, in community supported agriculture programs, which usually practice organic farming. In community supported agriculture, customers buy a “share” or subscription at the beginning of the growing season, then receive a portion of whatever produce the farm manages to grow. This system is meant to spread the risks of farming between farmers and consumers, create a closer bond between the farmer and consumer, and make organic agriculture more profitable. As the popularity of organic food has grown, organics have become big business. Major corporations now coordinate the production of organic ingredients all over the world. Due to the diversity of techniques and differing demands of different crops, there remains much controversy over how well organic farming achieves its goals of reducing its ecological footprint and improving consumer nutrition. The chart below shows that the demand for organic food in the US has grown steadily with the exception of the COVID year 2021.

If you want to learn more about this topic check out this USDA Organic Agriculture website produced by the United States Department of Agriculture.

The demand for organic foods has been growing steadily in part because there is the common realization that food and health, also reproductive and mental health are linked. In the United States the Environmental Working Group has been collecting data as to the pesticides and toxins contains within selected fruits and vegetables and has been at it for over 30 years. Here is a link to their quite interesting EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pestcides in Produce website.