Intensive farming Totally Explained

Everything about Intensive Agriculture totally explained

Intensive farming or intensive agriculture is an agricultural production system characterized by the high inputs of capital, fertilizers, labour, or labour-saving technologies such as pesticides relative to land area. This is in contrast to the concept of Extensive Agriculture which involves a low input of materials and labour with the crop yield depending largely on the naturally available soil fertility, water supply or other land qualities.
Modern day forms of intensive crop based agriculture involve the use of mechanical ploughing, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, plant growth regulators and/or pesticides. It is associated with the increasing use of agricultural mechanization, which have enabled a substantial increase in production. and are criticised by opponents for the low level of animal welfare standards and associated pollution and health issues.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages

Intensive agriculture has a number of benefits:

Significantly increased yield per available space than extensive farming.
Often leads to cheaper priced products because of better general production rate for the cost of raw materials.
Not much space for the animal(s) to move therefore less energy used up; so less food supplied to the cattle, which leads to cheaper products.
Many people feel its necessary to use intensive farming for better profits and economy

Disadvantages

Intensive farming alters the environment in many ways.

Removal of buffers to make large fields for maximum efficiency leading to lower food costs and greater food availability to the poor. But it also limits the natural habitat of some wild creatures and can lead to soil erosion.

Use of fertilizers can alter the biology of rivers and lakes. this level of greenhouse gas generation is a large component of the global warming threat and derives simply from an expanding human population.
   Rice-farming and the use of paddies in Korea is ancient. Korean paddy-farming can provide cultural background on the use of paddies in East Asia. A pit-house at the Daecheon-ni site yielded carbonized rice grains and radiocarbon dates indicating that rice cultivation may have begun as early as the Middle Jeulmun Pottery Period (c. 3500-2000 B.C.) in the Korean Peninsula (Crawford and Lee 2003). The earliest rice cultivation in the Korean Peninsula may have used dry-fields instead of paddies.
   The earliest Mumun features were usually located in low-lying narrow gulleys that were naturally swampy and fed by the local stream system. Some Mumun paddies in flat areas were made of a series of squares and rectangles separated by bunds approximately 10 cm in height, while terraced paddies consisted of long irregularly shapes that followed natural contours of the land at various levels (Bale 2001; Kwak 2001).
   Mumun Period rice farmers used all of the elements that are present in today's paddies such terracing, bunds, canals, and small reservoirs. We can grasp some paddy-farming techniques of the Middle Mumun (c. 850-550 B.C.) from the well-preserved wooden tools excavated from archaeological rice paddies at the Majeon-ni Site. However, iron tools for paddy-farming were not introduced until sometime after 200 B.C. The spatial scale of individual paddies, and thus entire paddy-fields, increased with the regular use of iron tools in the Three Kingdoms of Korea Period (c. A.D. 300/400-668).

Modern Intensive farming Types

Modern intensive farming refers to the industrialized production of animals (livestock, poultry and fish) and crops. The methods deployed are designed to produce the highest output at the lowest cost; usually using economies of scale, modern machinery, modern medicine, and global trade for financing, purchases and sales. The practice is widespread in developed nations, and most of the meat, dairy, eggs, and crops available in supermarkets are produced in this manner.

Sustainable Intensive Farming

Biointensive agriculture focuses on maximizing efficiency: yield per unit area, yield per energy input, yield per water input, etc.

Intensive Aquaculture

Aquaculture is the cultivation of the natural produce of water (fish, shellfish, algae, seaweed and other aquatic organisms). Intensive Aquaculture can often involve tanks or other highly controlled systems which are designed to boost production for the available volume or area of water resource.

Intensive Livestock Farming

The modern examples of intensive farming are broadly referred to as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or often termed Factory farming. These include:

Intensive pig farming or Intensive piggery farming

Large scale chicken farms

Cattle feed lots

Managed intensive grazing

This sustainable intensive livestock management system is increasingly used to optimize production within a sustainability framework and is generally not considered Factory farming.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Intensive Agriculture'.

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