| A | B |
|---|
| “Tragedy of the commons” | The depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one's self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to the group's long-term best interests, as asserted by ecologist Hardin. |
| Agrarian | Societies made up of farmers and promote agricultural interests |
| Agribusiness | Commercial agriculture characterized by the integration of different steps in the food-processing industry, usually through ownership by large corporations. |
| Agricultural Revolution | The time when human beings first domesticated plants and animals and no longer relied entirely on hunting and gathering. |
| Agriculture | The deliberate effort to modify a portion of Earth's surface through the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock for sustenance or economic gain. |
| Aquaculture/aquafarming | The cultivation of seafood under controlled conditions. |
| Biorevolution | Genetic engineering of plants and animals with the potential to greatly exceed the productivity improvements of the Green Revolution. |
| Biotechnology | The application of scientific techniques to modify and improve plants, animals, and microorganisms to enhance their value. |
| Cereal grain | A grass yielding grain for food. |
| Chaff | Husks of grain separated from the seed by threshing. |
| Collective farm | Regards a system of agricultural organization where as farm laborers are not compensated via wages but receive a share of the farm's net productivity. |
| Combine | A machine that reaps, threshes, and cleans grain while moving over a field. |
| Commercial agriculture | Agriculture undertaken primarily to generate products for sale off the farm. |
| Crop | Any plant gathered from a field as a harvest during a particular season. |
| Crop rotation | The practice of rotating use of different fields from crop to crop each year, to avoid exhausting the soil. |
| Cultivation regions | An area suited by climate and soil conditions to the growing of a certain type of crop or plant group. |
| Dairying | Branch of agriculture that encompasses the breeding, raising, and utilization of cows, primarily for the production of milk. |
| Debt-for-nature swap | Financial transactions in which a portion of a developing nation's foreign debt is forgiven in exchange for local investments in conservation measures. |
| Desertification | Degradation of land, especially in semiarid areas, primarily because of human actions such as excessive crop planting. |
| Dietary energy consumption | The amount of food that an individual consumes, measured in kilocalories (calories in the United States). |
| Double cropping | Harvesting twice a year from the same field. |
| Feedlot | Type of animal feeding operation which is used in factory framing for finishing livestock, notably beef cattle. |
| First Agricultural Revolution | Occurring about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago in Eastern Africa, South and East Asia, and Latin America, it domestication of plants and animals developed, subsequently allowing permanent settlements, rise of trade, currency and classes, disease, famine, expansion, and labor specialization. |
| Food chain | Representations of the predator-prey relationships between species within an ecosystem or habitat. |
| Food security | Physical, social, and economic access at all times to safe and nutritious food sufficent to meet dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. |
| Forestry | The are and science of managing forests, tree plantations, and related natural resources. |
| Grain | Seed of a cereal grass. |
| Green Revolution | Rapid diffusion of new agricultural technology, especially new high-yield seeds and fertilizers. |
| Growing season | The period of each when native plants and ornamental plants grow. |
| Horticulture | The growing of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. |
| Hull | The outer covering of a seed. |
| Hunting and gathering | The subsistence method based on edible plants and animals from the wild. |
| Intensive subsistence agriculture | A form of subsistence agriculture in which farmers must expend a relatively large amount of effort to produce the maximum feasible yield from a parcel of land. |
| Intertillage | Turning up land between rows of crop plants. |
| Market gardening | The growing of vegetables or flowers for market. |
| Mediterranean agriculture | A form of specialized agriculture in which crops grown in a Mediterranean climate of warm, year-round temperatures and sunny summers (grapes, olives, figs, citrus fruits, etc.) are grown. |
| Milkshed | The area surrounding a city from which milk is supplied. |
| Paddy | The Malay word for wet rice, commonly but incorrectly used to describe a sawah. |
| Pastoral nomadism | A form of subsistence agriculture based on herding domesticated animals. |
| Pasture | Grass or other plants grown for feeding grazing animals, as well as land used for grazing. |
| Plantation | A large farm in tropical and subtropical climates that specializes in the production of one or two crops for sale, usually to a more developed country. |
| Prime agricultural land | The most productive farmland. |
| Ranching | A form of commercial agriculture in which livestock graze over an extensive area. |
| Reaper | A machine that cuts grain standing in the field. |
| Ridge tillage | A system of planting crops on ridge tops in order to reduce farm production costs and promote greater soil conservation. |
| Sawah | A flooded field for growing rice. |
| Second Agricultural Revolution | Just before the Industrial Revolution in the 19th c., it allowed a shift in work force beyond subsistence farming to allow labor to work in factories. |
| Seed agriculture | Reproduction of plants through annual introduction of seeds, which result from sexual fertilization. |
| Shifting cultivation | A form of subsistence agriculture in which people shift activity from one field to another; each field is used for crops for relatively few years and left fallow for a relatively long period. |
| Slash-and-burn agriculture | Another name for shifting cultivation, so named because fields are cleared by slashing the vegetation and burning the debris. |
| Spring wheat | Wheat planted in the spring and harvested in the late summer. |
| Subsistence agriculture | Agriculture designed primarily to provide food for direct consumption by the farmer and the farmer's family. |
| Suitcase farm | Commercial grain agriculture done on a farm on which no one lives; planting and harvesting is done by hired migratory crews. |
| Survey pattern: long lot | System implemented in Quebec, Louisiana, Texas, and areas of French influence, that divide the land into narrow parcels stretching back from rivers, roads, or canals. |
| Survey pattern: metes and bounds | A system of land surveying east of the Appalachian Mountains that depends on descriptions of land ownership and natural features. |
| Sustainable agriculture | Farming methods that preserve long-term productivity of land and minimize pollution, typically by rotating soil-restoring crops with cash crops and reducing inputs of fertilizer and pesticides. |
| Swidden | A patch of land cleared for planting through slashing and burning. |
| Third Agricultural Revolution | Known as the Green Revolution, the rapid diffusion of new agricultural technology, especially new high-yield seeds and fertilizer with productivity increasing faster at the global level than population. |
| Thresh | To beat out grain from stalks. |
| Transhumance | The seasonal migration of livestock between mountains and lowland pastures. |
| Truck farming | Commercial gardening and fruit farming, so named because truck was a Middle English word meaning bartering or the exchange of commodities. |
| Undernourishment | Dietary energy consumption that is continuously below the minimum requirement for maintaining a healthy life and carrying out light physical activity. |
| Vegetative planting | Reproduction of plants by direct cloning from existing plants. |
| Von Thünen Model | Illustrates the relationship between the cost of land and the transportation costs involved in getting a product to market. |
| Wet rice | Rice planted on dry land in a nursery and then moved to a deliberately flooded field to promote growth. |
| Winnow | To remove chaff by allowing it to be blown away by the wind. |
| Winter wheat | Wheat planted in the autumn and harvested in the early summer. |
