Subsistence and Commercial Agriculture: Reading the Type from the Climate

Two independent axes

Intensity measures inputs of labour and capital per unit of land. Purpose separates subsistence agriculture (the household consumes most of what it grows) from commercial agriculture (output is sold). These axes are independent: ranching is extensive and commercial, wet-rice farming is intensive and largely subsistence.

Extensive subsistence

Shifting cultivation (slash-and-burn; milpa in Latin America, ladang in Southeast Asia) occurs in humid tropical rainforest. Farmers clear and burn a patch, farm the ash-fertilized soil for two or three years, then leave it fallow for a decade or more. It requires low population density and large land reserves; population growth shortens the fallow, and shortened fallow is what turns the practice into deforestation.

Pastoral nomadism occupies arid and semi-arid lands too dry for cultivation. Herds are moved seasonally; transhumance is the specific seasonal movement between highland and lowland pasture.

Intensive subsistence

Wet-rice agriculture in East, South and Southeast Asia: tiny plots, enormous labour input, double or triple cropping, terracing on slopes. High population density is both cause and consequence.

Commercial types

Plantation agriculture: large estates in the tropics and subtropics of the periphery, growing a monoculture cash crop (coffee, cacao, rubber, sugar, bananas, palm oil) for export to core markets — a directly colonial inheritance.

Mediterranean agriculture occurs in exactly five regions with hot dry summers and mild wet winters: the Mediterranean basin, coastal California, central Chile, southwestern South Africa and southwestern Australia. Characteristic products: olives, grapes, figs, dates, citrus and horticulture, with cereals grown in winter.

Also commercial: mixed crop and livestock farming, commercial grain farming, dairying (organised around a milkshed, historically limited by perishability), livestock ranching, and market gardening or truck farming.