Soil properties and texture
Primary productivity
Primary productivity of soil depends on:
• Here's an example:
• Feature: Food waste
• Measurement: - collect all the food waste in a bucket at the end of each lunch
time. Measure the mass of the waste. Repeat this measure every day for 3 weeks.
• Time Scale: Three months
• Acceptable Outcome: 10% reduction in food waste
• Measures to ensure it happens:
• Survey students to ask why food waste is generated.
• Talk to cafeteria staff about ideas for changing this problem.
• Make a presentation in assembly about food waste
• Ask for student commitment to reduce waste.
Project
• Subsistence farming vs commercial form (Agribusiness)
Agribusiness occurs when food production is not to satisfy the community’s needs but is to ensure profitable
return for capital investment. The principal of agribusiness is to maximize productivity and profit in order to
compete
in a global market.
Project
Environmental Indicators to
measure and evaluate food waste
production in your school or
home.
5.2 Inequality of food distribution
• This significant idea revolves around the idea there is a vast
amount of food waste produced every year around the world but
the reasons for this waste differ between LEDCs and MEDCs.
Problems causing food inequality
• Economic
• Ecological
• Socio political
economic
• Demand for cereal grains has outstripped supply in recent
years.
• Rising energy prices and agricultural production and transport
costs have pushed up costs all along the farm-to-market chain.
• Serious underinvestment in agricultural production technology
in LEDCs has resulted in poor productivity and underdeveloped
rural infrastructure.
• The production of food for local markets has declined in many
LEDCs as more food has been produced for export.
Ecological
• Significant periods of poor weather and a number of sever
weather events have had a major impact on harvests in key
food exporting nations.
• Increasing problems of soil degradation in both MEDC and
LEDCs.
• Declining biodiversity may impact on food production in the
future.
Socio political
• The global agricultural production and trading system, built on
import tariffs and subsidies, creates great distortions favouring
production in MEDCs and disadvantages in LEDCs.
• An inadequate international system of monitoring and deploying
food relief.
• Disagreements over the use of trans-boundary resources such
as river systems and aquifers.
State the 4 main characteristics of
agribusiness
GROUP
ACTIVITIES
IN
PROGRESS
• Intensive animal farming (e.g. intensive cattle
Levels of (page 293) and chicken farming) employs
the widespread use of antibiotics. Because the
commercial and animals are kept in tightly packed pens
subsistence food and are in close proximity to each other, disease
production also can quickly spread through the farms.
Antibiotics (which kill bacteria) ensure that the
affect the animals remain healthy. The use of
sustainability of antibiotics in farming has been criticized
terrestrial food because it can lead to the emergence of
antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Many scientists
production. believe that antibiotics should be limited
to treating human infection.
Food waste (ref pg 284-285)
• List the various reasons for the food waste:
Summarise the nature of waste in LEDCs and
MEDCs pg 285-286
Socio-economic, Socio-economic factors in terrestrial food production include:
cultural, ecological, farming for profit or subsistence;
political, and economic farming for export or local consumption;
factors can be seen to farming for quantity or quality;
influence societies in traditional or commercial farming.
their choices of food
production systems
Terrestrial farming systems can be divided into several types.
Terrestrial
farming
system
commercial subsistence
Intensive Extensive Intensive Extensive
farms farms farms farms
The environmental impacts of
food production systems include:
Human attitude to eating meat
• As a consumer, you have a role to play by selecting the food you eat from food production systems that are sustainable. The question is –
which food-production
systems are sustainable, and how can we choose between them? Improving the
accuracy of food labels in supermarkets would help consumers to make increasingly
informed food choices. Buying locally produced food would minimize the food-miles
used in transportation, limiting its ecological footprint (pages 437–441). Buying food
that minimizes pesticide use also offers a more sustainable choice.
• More land is needed to grow meat than crops, therefore leading to greater habitat loss.
• Increased global meat consumption (pages 290–291) leads to a less sustainable future
for farming.
Organic farming
• Organic farming provides an ecocentric approach to farming by achieving an ecological balance that
conserves soil fertility, prevents pest outbreaks, and takes a preventative rather than reactive approach to
environmental issues.
• In other words, organic farming tends to avoid problems rather than having to solve them once
they have emerged.
• organic farming is certainly sustainable at the local level, although it alone could not feed the world’s
growing population
Buffer zones
Monitor and control
