Agriculture Reading Guide

Answers must be handwritten

Introduction

  1. What is one of the most fundamental differences between MDCs and LDCs?

Key Issue 1

  1. Describe the way pre-agricultural Hunters and Gatherers lived?
  2. What are the two types of cultivation? Which geographer is credited with this information?
  3. Where are the hearths of vegetative planting? According to which geographer?
  4. Where are the hearths of seed planting? According to which geographer?
  5. What are the 5 distinctive features that distinguish commercial farming from subsistence farming?
  6. What is the average size of a United States commercial farm? How big are the “large farms?”
  7. What has happened to the number of farmers in the US since 1900? What has happened to the amount of farmland since 1900? What is the cause of the reduction in farmland since 1960?
  8. Which geographer’s map of agricultural regions is most common? How many agricultural regions? The agricultural regions are similar to climate regions.

Key Issue 2

  1. What is the difference in cultivation and agriculture? So what does the term “shifting cultivation” tell you about the agriculture in the region?
  2. What is swidden?
  3. What percentage of land is occupied by shifting cultivation? What percentage of people engage in shifting cultivation? What do those numbers tell you about shifting cultivation?
  4. What is the most convincing argument to move away from shifting cultivation? What is the most convincing argument to maintain shifting cultivation?
  5. What type of animals is kept by pastoral nomads? Why criteria determine which animals will be kept?
  6. What does intensive mean? What does a high agricultural density indicate?
  7. What is wet rice?

Key Issue 3

  1. In a four-field system, what types of crops are rotated?
  2. What are the 2 most important crops in the US?
  3. What do dairy farmers that live in remote areas do with the excess milk? Why do they choose this option?
  4. In the mid-1800s, how did cattle ranchers get the cattle to the Chicago market?
  5. How did the cattle ranchers use of land change during the “Range Wars?”
  6. What are the common physical features of Mediterranean Agriculture? What are the 2 most important cash crops? Which countries produce the majority of the world’s wine?
  7. What two costs must a commercial farmer compare?
  8. Draw and label the Von Thunen model (the easy one, not the one modified by water).
  9. What assumptions did Von Thunen make?

Key Issue 4

  1. What problem have successful commercial farmers created for themselves? What are the government’s plans to address the problem?
  2. Define sustainable agriculture. What are the 3 principal practices that distinguish sustainable agriculture?
  3. What is the significance of “Roundup Ready seeds”?
  4. to be continued…