6: Agricultural and Food Systems

Domestication & the Birth of Agriculture

The word domestication comes from the Latin words Domesticus and Domus, referring to “belonging to the household” and “house.” In terms of agriculture, as defined by National Geographic, “Domestication is the process of adapting wild plants and animals for human use. Domestic species are raised for food, work, clothing, medicine, and many other uses. Domesticated plants and animals must be raised and cared for by humans. Domesticated species are not wild.”

To domesticate a plant, seeds are gathered and planted in the ground instead of natural forms of distribution to potentially root and grow. Enough sun and water are provided to facilitate growth and then the plants are harvested. To domesticate an animal, wild animals are enclosed and provided a food source; some animals are more easily domesticated than others. Cross-breeding between particularly desirable plant and animal strains and species is common and new species may emerge over time entirely distinct from their wild predecessors.

What did domestication help to directly bring about and set the conditions for?

• Agriculture (i.e. the process of cultivating domesticated species)
• Tool development
• More permanently settled population
• Food surplus
• Specialization of tasks/labor/jobs away from exclusively agriculture
• Hearth areas
• Urbanization (eventually)
• Trade
• Currency

The basic logic goes like this: By growing domesticated plants, you do not have to obtain nourishment by wandering around to follow your food source, which is the norm within hunting-gathering lifestyles. Instead, you stay in one area and produce enough food for yourself (you exceed sustenance) and a surplus. The (first) agricultural revolution refers to when the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture occurred, about 10,000 years ago.

Now that you are familiar with the “what” and “how” of agriculture, you should be wondering about the “where” of agriculture– where did domestication and agriculture emerge? Take a look below for the locations of where major plants and animals were first domesticated. Pull up a reference map on the internet if you don’t know the locations of the green hearths.

You should notice that domestication is not distributed entirely evenly across place. It is clustered in what are called agricultural hearths, referring to regions of the world where many species were domesticated. Check out the video below for a recap of information about domestication, agriculture, and hearth areas.

Types & Transformations of Agriculture

The most basic way to characterize types of agriculture is into the following:

• Subsistence agriculture: food is produced for family consumption
• Commercial agriculture: food is produced for sale

There are additional types of agriculture within these two categories, including slash-and-burn, shifting cultivation, intensive subsistence, pastoral nomadism, transhumance, plantations, and agribusiness. All of these types of agriculture feature different methods and procedures. Another spectrum of difference in agricultural methods is based on intensification: the amount of agricultural extract per unit land. Agricultural methods can range from extensive to intensive, or from having low human inputs and productive outputs, to having high human inputs and productive outputs. In general, societies tend to become more intensive over time, as it means that more can be produced per unit land. However, intensification does have real drawbacks:

• Agriculture is more work; hunters and gatherers may only need 2-3 days a week to gather necessary sustenance but agriculturalists must work 6-7 days to maintain large plots of crops
• Agriculture is more fragile; one major disaster or pestilence can remove a societies major food source
• Agriculture can be less healthy; if agriculturalists farm and depend upon a single crop, malnourishment may occur

A few other interesting and creative ways to produce food include the following:

• Aquaculture, or cultivating food or animals in water (examples: fish, cranberries, hydroponic lettuce)
• Urban gardening, or cultivating food or animals in an urban as opposed to rural setting (examples: growing a tomato plant on your front stoop or balcony, renting a community garden plot, rooftop gardens)

Aside from the first agricultural revolution, which refers to the birth of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the second agricultural revolution refers to major transformations in technology used for agriculture, specifically regarding irrigation, harvesting, and transportation, around the time of the Industrial Revolution, ~mid-1700s-mid -1800s.

second agricultural revolutionAn additional agricultural revolution that has taken place is the Green Revolution, referring to the influx of high-yield seeds and fertilizers, and often GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

Consumptive Behaviors & Food (In)security

The amount and type of food we consume varies across space as does our safe and secure access to food. This chapter opened by defining food security as having steady, affordable, and safe access to sufficient food and food insecurity as just the opposite.

DEEPEN YOUR UNDERSTANDING: Read more about food insecurity as explained by Feeding America here and be sure to view the chart that appears on the linked page.

To get an idea of food security and insecurity at a global scale, compare and contrast the maps below and consider the following questions:

• What spatial patterns are present?
• What socio-cultural, economic, political, and physical geographical factors contextualize the spatial distribution of daily per capital caloric supply, obesity, and undernourishment?

Some people may experience food insecurity due to living in what’s called a food desert. Food deserts refer to “regions of the country often feature large proportions of households with low incomes, inadequate access to transportation, and a limited number of food retailers providing fresh produce and healthy groceries for affordable prices” according to the USDA. Often food deserts are identified by the following parameters:

• Urban food desert: distance to nearest grocery store is 1+ miles in area with primarily low-income residents (profiled in the embedded video below)
• Rural food desert: distance to nearest grocery store is 10+ miles in area with primarily low-income residents

Check out the USDA’s Food Desert Research Atlas to explore patterns in the US and see if you live in or near a food desert. Remember, you may experience food security or food insecurity if you technically live in a food desert; level of food security has to do with your overall access and capability–physical, social, and financial–to food, not just if you live in a designated food desert or not.

Beyond food insecurity and food deserts can be large-scale bouts of hunger called famines. Famines affect large populations and can be regional to national in geographic scale. The common perception is that famine occurs when there is not enough food in a region to support the population. Scholar Amartya Sen argued instead that famines are often failures of the system that links food supply to food demand. Sen showed that the 1943 Bengal famine occurred due to the inability for millions to afford the rapid inflation of food prices, along with with poor distribution, government response and hoarding. The 1959-1962 famine in China coincided with the Great Leap Forward, a program of rapid industrialization. The program may have caused some 35 million people to die in a famine due to processes of collectivization of farms that produced food sent to industrial cities, leading to massive rural starvation.

End of Chapter Activity: Compare & Contrast

This chapter has provided language to describe the differences in agricultural practices and unevenness regarding agricultural lifestyles and individual consumptive behavior. To end, watch the videos below, each of which profiles fish cultivation and answer the following questions pertaining to each video:

• What are the processes for securing fish?
• Who is the typical consumer of the fish?
• What types of economic activity (primary, secondary, etc) are present for each process?
• How would you describe each of these fishing landscapes in terms of culture and economy?
• How are the processes in each video related to globalization?
• How could the different ways of fishing relate to food security and insecurity?