Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people to live in cities. The history of agriculture began thousands of years ago. After gathering wild grains beginning at least 105,000 years ago, nascent farmers began to plant them around 11,500 years ago. Sheep, goats, pigs and cattle were domesticated over 10,000 years ago. Plants were independently cultivated in at least 11 regions of the world. Industrial agriculture based on large-scale monoculture in the twentieth century came to dominate agricultural output, though about 2 billion people still depended on subsistence agriculture.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to agriculture:
Intensive agriculture, also known as intensive farming, conventional, or industrial agriculture, is a type of agriculture, both of crop plants and of animals, with higher levels of input and output per unit of agricultural land area. It is characterized by a low fallow ratio, higher use of inputs such as capital and labour, and higher crop yields per unit land area.
A renewable resource, also known as a flow resource, is a natural resource which will replenish to replace the portion depleted by usage and consumption, either through natural reproduction or other recurring processes in a finite amount of time in a human time scale. When the recovery rate of resources is unlikely to ever exceed a human time scale, these are called perpetual resources. Renewable resources are a part of Earth's natural environment and the largest components of its ecosphere. A positive life-cycle assessment is a key indicator of a resource's sustainability.
Environmental vegetarianism is the practice of vegetarianism when motivated by the desire to create a sustainable diet that avoids the negative environmental impact of meat production. Livestock as a whole is estimated to be responsible for around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As a result, significant reduction in meat consumption has been advocated by, among others, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their 2019 special report and as part of the 2017 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity.
Energy forestry is a form of forestry in which a fast-growing species of tree or woody shrub is grown specifically to provide biomass or biofuel for heating or power generation.
The history of agriculture in India dates back to the neolothic. India ranks second worldwide in farm outputs. As per 2018, agriculture employed more than 50% of the Indian work force and contributed 17–18% to country's GDP.
A sustainable food system is a type of food system that provides healthy food to people and creates sustainable environmental, economic and social systems that surround food. Sustainable food systems start with the development of sustainable agricultural practices, development of more sustainable food distribution systems, creation of sustainable diets and reduction of food waste throughout the system. Sustainable food systems have been argued to be central to many or all 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The environmental impact of meat production varies because of the wide variety of agricultural practices employed around the world. All agricultural practices have been found to have a variety of effects on the environment. Some of the environmental effects that have been associated with meat production are pollution, greenhouse gas emissions through fossil fuel usage, animal methane, effluent waste, and water and land consumption. Meat is obtained through a variety of methods, including organic farming, free range farming, intensive livestock production, subsistence agriculture, hunting, and fishing.
Agricultural land is typically land devoted to agriculture, the systematic and controlled use of other forms of life—particularly the rearing of livestock and production of crops—to produce food for humans. It is generally synonymous with both farmland or cropland, as well as pasture or rangeland.
There are various social, economic, environmental and technical issues with biofuel production and use, which have been discussed in the popular media and scientific journals. These include: the effect of moderating oil prices, the "food vs fuel" debate, poverty reduction potential, carbon emissions levels, sustainable biofuel production, deforestation and soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, effect on water resources, the possible modifications necessary to run the engine on biofuel, as well as energy balance and efficiency. The International Resource Panel, which provides independent scientific assessments and expert advice on a variety of resource-related themes, assessed the issues relating to biofuel use in its first report Towards sustainable production and use of resources: Assessing Biofuels. In it, it outlined the wider and interrelated factors that need to be considered when deciding on the relative merits of pursuing one biofuel over another. It concluded that not all biofuels perform equally in terms of their effect on climate, energy security and ecosystems, and suggested that environmental and social effects need to be assessed throughout the entire life-cycle.
Farm water, also known as agricultural water, is water committed for use in the production of food and fibre and collecting for further resources. In the US, some 80% of the fresh water withdrawn from rivers and groundwater is used to produce food and other agricultural products. Farm water may include water used in the irrigation of crops or the watering of livestock. Its study is called agricultural hydrology.
Animal-free agriculture, also known as veganic agriculture, stockfree farming or veganic farming, consists of farming methods that do not use animals or animal products.
The environmental impact of agriculture is the effect that different farming practices have on the ecosystems around them, and how those effects can be traced back to those practices. The environmental impact of agriculture varies widely based on practices employed by farmers and by the scale of practice. Farming communities that try to reduce environmental impacts through modifying their practices will adopt sustainable agriculture practices. The negative impact of agriculture is an old issue that remains a concern even as experts design innovative means to reduce destruction and enhance eco-efficiency. Though some pastoralism is environmentally positive, modern animal agriculture practices tend to be more environmentally destructive than agricultural practices focused on fruits, vegetables and other biomass. The emissions of ammonia from cattle waste continue to raise concerns over environmental pollution.
HarvestChoice is a research initiative, which generates information to help guide strategic investments in agriculture aimed at improving the well-being of poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa through more productive and profitable farming. The initiative is coordinated by the International Food Policy Research Institute and the University of Minnesota and is supported by a grant to IFPRI by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Marginal land is land that is of little agricultural or developmental value because crops produced from the area would be worth less than any rent paid for access to the area. Although the term marginal is often used in a subjective sense for less-than-ideal lands, it is fundamentally an economic term that is defined by the local economic context. Thus what constitutes marginal land varies both with location and over time: for example, "a soil profile with a set of specific biophysical characteristics reported as “marginal” in the US corn belt may be one of the better soils available in another context". Changes in product values – such as the ethanol-demand induced spike in corn prices – can result in formerly marginal lands becoming profitable. Marginal lands can therefore be more difficult to delineate as compared to "abandoned crop lands" which reflect more clearly definable landowner-initiated land use changes.
Ecocrop was a database used to determine the suitability of a crop for a specified environment. Developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) it provided information predicting crop viability in different locations and climatic conditions. It also served as a catalog of plants and plant growth characteristics.
Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is an integrated approach to managing landscapes to help adapt agricultural methods, livestock and crops to the effects of climate change and, where possible, counteract it by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, at the same time taking into account the growing world population to ensure food security. Thus, the emphasis is not simply on carbon farming or sustainable agriculture, but also on increasing agricultural productivity. "CSA ... is in line with FAO’s vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture and supports FAO’s goal to make agriculture, forestry and fisheries more productive and more sustainable".
Agriculture contributes towards climate change through greenhouse gas emissions and by the conversion of non-agricultural land such as forests into agricultural land. In 2019 the IPCC reported that 13%-21% of anthropogenic greenhouse gasses came specifically from the Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Uses Sector (AFOLU). Emissions from agriculture of nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide make up to half of the greenhouse-gases produced by the overall food industry, or 80% of agricultural emissions. Animal husbandry is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
A foodprint refers to the environmental pressures created by the food demands of individuals, organizations, and geopolitical entities. Like other forms of ecological footprinting, a foodprint can include multiple parameters to quantify the overall environmental impact of food, including carbon footprinting, water footprinting, and foodshed mapping. Some foodprinting efforts also attempt to capture the social and ethical costs of food production by accounting for dimensions such as farm worker justice or prices received by farmers for goods as a share of food dollars. Environmental advocacy organizations like the Earth Day Network and the Natural Resources Defense Council have publicized the foodprint concept as a way of engaging consumers on the environmental impacts of dietary choices.
