CONCLUSION

We have seen that the ancient human endeavor called agriculture varies markedly from region to region and is reflected in formal agricultural regions; we have also seen that we can better understand this complicated pattern through the themes of mobility, the global food system, nature-culture interactions, and agricultural landscape. Once again, we have seen the interwoven character of the five themes of cultural geography. In many fundamental ways, the agricultural revolution changed humankind. In equally dramatic fashion, the Industrial Revolution sparked further changes. We will use the five themes to guide an exploration of the industrial world in the next chapter.

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DOING GEOGRAPHY

The Global Geography of Food

Until recently, people throughout history obtained the food they needed either by growing it themselves or procuring it directly from nearby farmers. The choice and availability of food were limited and changed seasonally. About 100 years ago, this situation began to change dramatically as the pace of urbanization and industrialization accelerated. Today, very few people in developed countries grow their own food or even know where the food they eat was produced or who produced it. Where does our food come from? Who produces and sells it? Your task for this exercise is to find out.

This exercise can be organized as a group or individual project. As a group project, students can be assigned to research particular categories of food, such as meat and poultry, cereals and grains, fruits and vegetables, and dairy products. As an individual project, you should begin with a typical day’s meals and identify all their ingredients (don’t forget the seasonings and cooking oils used in preparing them).

Steps to Tracing the Global Geography of Food

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Take a careful look at the two photos shown here and systematically identify the differences in each, beginning with the one on the left. The most striking aspect of this aerial landscape shot is the abrupt division between the cultivated land at the top and the noncultivated land at the bottom. Looking closely, we see that an irrigation channel forms the boundary between the two. A second prominent feature of the landscape is the checkerboard pattern of the fields and the straight roads forming their boundaries. Other details emerge as you look more closely. For example, the settlement pattern consists of isolated, sparsely arranged farmsteads separated by large expanses of cultivated fields. You might also note that the uncultivated land is brown and treeless and that trees in the cultivated portion are found only along the watercourses.

The landscape features in the photo on the right are nearly the opposite of those in the image on the left. Settlement is clustered in a densely populated village centered on a church and town square. The fields are of irregular sizes and shapes and form a band of cultivated land around the concentrations of houses, some of which are built of stone. There is no clear evidence of irrigation. Trees and shrubs are concentrated in the outermost band but also occur throughout the landscape, which overall appears verdant.

Putting all these visual clues together leads us to conclude that the landscape on the left must be somewhere in the western United States. We know this region was surveyed and settled under the township and range system, which explains the isolated farmsteads and checkerboard pattern. We also know that much of the western United States is arid or semiarid, which explains the need for irrigation and the general lack of trees and green vegetation in the bottom half of the photo. In fact, this is a photo of Mack, Colorado, where irrigation meets the desert. The landscape on the right is probably located in Europe. The large church in the center and dense cluster of houses suggest the settlement pattern of a historical market town. The irregular fields and their close proximity to the town are explained by deep historical patterns of land ownership and the reliance on foot travel in preindustrial agriculture. The verdant landscape and absence of irrigation suggest the temperate climate characteristic of western Europe. In fact, you are looking at the vineyard region of Saöne-et-Loire, France.

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Match each of the terms on the left with its definition on the right. Click on the term first and then click on the matching definition. As you match them correctly they will move to the bottom of the activity.

Question

You can learn more about agricultural geography on the Internet at the following web sites:

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Andrews, Jean. 1993. “Diffusion of Mesoamerican Food Complex to Southeastern Europe.” Geographical Review 83: 194-204.

Bassett, Thomas, and Alex Winter-Nelson. 2010. The Atlas of World Hunger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bourne, Joel, Jr. 2007. “Biofuels: Boon or Boondoggle.” National Geographic Magazine 212(4): 38-59.

Boyd, William, and Michael Watts. 1997. “Agroindustrial Just-In-Time: The Chicken Industry and Postwar American Capitalism.” In M. Watts and D. Goodman (eds.), Globalizing Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring, pp. 192-225. London: Routledge.

Carney, Judith. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Carter, Eric, Bianca Silva, and Graciela Guzman. 2013. “Migration, Acculturation, and Environmental Values: The Case of Mexican Immigrants in Central Iowa.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 130(1): 129-147.

Centers for Disease Control. Tracking and Reporting Foodborne Disease Outbreaks. http://www.cdc.gov/Features/dsFoodborneOutbreaks/.

Chakravarti, A. K. 1973. “Green Revolution in India.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 63: 319-330.

Cowan, C. Wesley, and Patty J. Watson (eds.). 1992. The Origins of Agriculture: An International Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Cross, John A. 1994. “Agroclimatic Hazards and Fishing in Wisconsin.” Geographical Review 84: 277-289.

Darby, H. Clifford. 1956. “The Clearing of the Woodland in Europe.” In William L. Thomas, Jr. (ed.), Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, pp. 183-216. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Demangeon, Albert. 1946. La France. Paris: Armand Colin.

Diamond, Jared. 2002. “Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication.” Nature 418: 700-707.

Dillehay, T., J. Rossen, T. Andres, and D. Williams. 2007. “Preceramic Adoption of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru.” Science 316(5833): 1890-1893.

Global Education Project. 2014. Earth: A Graphic Look at the State of the World. “Fisheries and Agriculture.” http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/fisheries-and-aquaculture.php.

Ewald, Ursula. 1977. “The von Thünen Principle and Agricultural Zonation in Colonial Mexico.” Journal of Historical Geography 3: 123-133.

Freidberg, Susanne. 2001. “Gardening on the Edge: The Conditions of Un-sustainability on an African Urban Periphery.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91(2): 349-369.

Griffin, Ernst. 1973. “Testing the von Thünen Theory in Uruguay.” Geographical Review 63: 500-516.

Griliches, Zvi. 1960. “Hybrid Corn and the Economics of Innovation.” Science 132 (26 July): 275-280.

Guthman, Julie. 2004. Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harris, Gardiner. 2013. “Farmers Change over Spices’ Link to Food Ills.” New York Times, 27 August, A1.

Hewes, Lewlie. 1973. The Suitcase Farming Frontier: A Study in the Historical Geography of the Central Great Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Heynen, Nik. 2010. “Cooking Up Non-Violent Civil Disobedient Direct Action for the Hungry: Food Not Bombs and the Resurgence of Radical Democracy.” Urban Studies 47(6): 1225-1240.

Hidore, John J. 1963. “Relationship Between Cash Grain Farming and Landforms.” Economic Geography 39: 84-89.

Hollander, Gail. 2008. Raising Cane in the ‘Glades: The Global Sugar Trade and the Transformation of Florida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Horvath, Ronald J. 1969. “Von Thünen’s Isolated State and the Area Around Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 59: 308-323.

ISAAA. 2007. International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications web site. http://www.isaaa.org.

Johannessen, Carl L. 1966. “The Domestication Processes in Trees Reproduced by Seed: The Pejibaye Palm in Costa Rica.” Geographical Review 56: 363-376.

Mathews, Kenneth, Jason Bernstein, and Jean Buzby. 2003. “International Trade of Meat and Poultry Products and Food Safety Issues.” In Jean Buzby (ed.), International Trade and Food Safety: Economic Theory and Case Studies. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service.

Millstone, Erik, and Tim Lang. 2003. The Penguin Atlas of Food. New York: Penguin.

Mitchell, Don. 1996. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Murphey, Rhoads. 1951. “The Decline of North Africa Since the Roman Occupation: Climatic or Human?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 41: 116-131.

Norberg-Hodge, Helena, Todd Merrifield, and Steven Gorelick. 2002. Bringing the Food Economy Home: Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness. London: Zed.

Popper, Deborah E., and Frank Popper. 1987. “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.” Planning 53(12): 12-18.

Saarinen, Thomas F. 1966. Perception of Drought Hazard on the Great Plains. University of Chicago, Department of Geography, Research Paper No. 106. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Sauer, Carl O. 1952. Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. New York: American Geographical Society.

Sauer, Jonathan D. 1993. Historical Geography of Crop Plants. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press.

Schlenker, Wolfram, and David B. Lobell. 2010. “Robust Negative Impacts of Climate Change on African Agriculture.” Environmental Research Letters 5(1): 1-8.

Strom, Stephanie. 2013. “Food Supplier Grapples with Frequent Recalls.” New York Times, 29 August, B1.

Thrower, Norman J. W. 1966. Original Survey and Land Subdivision. Chicago: Rand McNally.

United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. 2013. Food Outlook. Rome: UNFAO.

U.S. Department of Agriculture. 2004. Economic Research Service web site. http://www.ers.usda.gov.

Vogeler, Ingolf. 1981. The Myth of the Family Farm: Agribusiness Dominance of United States Agriculture. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

von Thünen, Johann Heinrich. 1966. Von Thünen’s Isolated State: An English Edition of Der Isolierte Staat. Carla M. Wartenberg (trans.). Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon.

Wallander, Steven, Roger Claassen, and Cynthia Nickerson. 2011. The Ethanol Decade: An Expansion of U.S. Corn Production, 2000-09. Economic Information Bulletin Number 79. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service.

Westcott, Paul. 2007. Ethanol Expansion in the United States: How Will the Agricultural Sector Adjust? Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service.

Wilken, Gene C. 1987. Good Farmers: Traditional Agricultural and Resource Management in Mexico and Central America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Zimmerer, Karl. 1996. Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes. Berkeley: University of California Press.

(For additional suggested readings, see the Contemporary Human Geography LaunchPad: macmillanhighered.com/launchpad/DomoshCHG1e.)

Bassett, Thomas, and Alex Winter-Nelson. 2010. The Atlas of World Hunger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The authors map out the geography and causes of world hunger from a critical social science perspective.

Clay, Jason. 2004. World Agriculture and the Environment: A Commodity-by-Commodity Guide to Impacts and Practices. Washington, D.C., and Covelo, Calif.: Island Press. This book describes the environmental effects resulting from the production of 22 major crops; it is global in scope and encyclopedic in detail.

Denham, Tim, Jose Iriarte, and Luc Vrydaghs (eds.). 2007. Rethinking Agriculture: Archeological and Ethnoarcheological Perspectives. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press. An edited volume bringing together geographers, anthropologists, and archaeologists to present the latest research findings on the origins of early agriculture in non-Eurasian regions.

Freidberg, Susanne. 2010. Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. A wonderfully written cultural and historical geography study of the pursuit of freshness in the global food system. The range of topics is sweeping and includes every link in the commodity chain from farm to table.

Gertel, Jorg, and Richard Le Heron (eds.). 2011. Economic Spaces of Pastoral Production and Commodity Systems. Williston, Vt.: Ashgate Press. A deeply ethnographic collection of studies on pastoralism in the twenty-first century. It provides an enlightening set of comparative cases from around the world, including countries typically underrep-resented in such collections.

Millstone, Erik, and Tim Lang. 2008. The Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where, and Why. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. A book packed with information on global agriculture on a wide range of topics, including genetically modified crops, fast food, organic farming, and more, all presented in brilliantly detailed maps.

Morgan, Kevin, Terry Marsden, and Jonathan Murdoch. 2006. Worlds of Food: Place, Power and Provenance in the Food Chain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. A valuable contribution to twenty-first-century studies of the global food system. Its authors link recent cultural shifts in food preference to the emergence of an alternative geography of agriculture that emphasizes the importance of place and region.

Sauer, Carl O. 1969. Seeds, Spades, Hearths, and Herds. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. The renowned American cultural geographer presents his theories on the origins of plant and animal domestication—the beginnings of agriculture.

Watts, M., and D. Goodman (eds.). 1997. Globalizing Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring. London: Routledge. This edited volume, containing primarily the work of geographers, analyzes globalization and the biotechnological revolution in agriculture.

Woods, Michael. Rural. 2011. New York: Routledge. Part of the “Key Ideas in Geography” series from the publisher. This is wide-ranging synopsis of the latest geographic research on the rural, including but not limited to issues of food and agriculture. It is particularly strong in addressing the themes of globalization and landscape in contemporary rural spaces.

Agriculture and Human Values. An interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the study of ethical questions surrounding agricultural practices and food. Published by Kluwer. Volume 1 appeared in 1984. Visit the homepage of the journal at http://link.springer.com/journal/10460.

Journal of Agrarian Change. A journal focusing on agrarian political economy, featuring both historical and contemporary studies of the dynamics of production, property, and power. Published by John Wiley & Sons. Volume 1 appeared in 2000. Visit the homepage of the journal at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1471-0366.

Journal of Peasant Studies. One of the leading journals of rural development, especially focused on marginalized agricultural communities and social groups in Third World regions. Published by Taylor & Francis. Volume 1 appeared in 1973. Visit the homepage of the journal at http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjps20#.UokN85hZ6ew.

Journal of Rural Studies. An international interdisciplinary journal ranked as the best of its kind. Published by Pergamon, an imprint of Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Volume 1 appeared in 1985. Visit the homepage of the journal at http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-rural-studies/.