Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the world's food and about 6% of the protein in the hu-
man diet.
tries. It involves growing
cash crops
(such as bananas,
coffee, soybeans, sugarcane, cocoa, and vegetables) on
large monoculture plantations, mostly for sale in devel-
oped countries.
An increasing amount of livestock production in
developed countries is industrialized. Large numbers
of cattle are brought to densely populated
feedlots,
where they are fattened up for about 4 months before
slaughter. Most pigs and chickens in developed coun-
tries spend their lives in densely populated pens and
cages and eat mostly grain grown on cropland.
Traditional agriculture
consists of two main types,
which together are practiced by 2.7 billion people (42%
of the world's people) in developing countries, and
provide about one-fifth of the world's food supply.
Traditional subsistence agriculture
uses mostly hu-
man labor and draft animals to produce only enough
crops or livestock for a farm family's survival. In
tradi-
tional intensive agriculture,
farmers increase their in-
puts of human and draft-animal labor, fertilizer, and
Science: Industrial and Traditional
Food Production
About 80% of the world's food supply is produced by
industrialized agriculture and 20% by subsistence
agriculture.
There are two major types of agricultural systems:
in-
dustrialized
and
traditional.
Industrialized agriculture,
or
high-input agriculture,
uses large amounts of fossil
fuel energy, water, commercial fertilizers, and pesti-
cides to produce single crops (monocultures) or live-
stock animals for sale. Practiced on one-fourth of all
cropland, mostly in developed countries (Figure 10-3),
this form of agriculture has spread since the mid-1960s
to some developing countries.
Plantation agriculture
is a form of industrialized
agriculture used primarily in tropical developing coun-
Industrialized agriculture
Plantation agriculture
Intensive traditional agriculture
Shifting cultivation
Nomadic herding
No agriculture
Figure 10-3
Global outlook:
locations of the world's principal types of food production. Excluding
Antarctica and Greenland, agricultural systems cover almost one-third of the earth's land surface.
