Almost everything on your plate began on a farm. Yet a rice paddy in the Philippines, a wheat prairie in Canada and a goat herd in the Sahel are all doing the same basic job in wildly different ways. Cambridge geographers cut through the variety with one powerful idea: every farm, however large or small, is a system.
Farming as a system
A system has inputs (what goes in), processes (what is done), and outputs (what comes out). Some outputs are fed back in — this is feedback (for example, manure or profit reinvested in seed).
Ways of classifying farms
- Commercial (grown to sell for profit) vs subsistence (grown to feed the farmer's own family).
- Arable (growing crops) vs pastoral (raising animals); a farm doing both is mixed.
- Intensive (high inputs/output per hectare, e.g. a market garden) vs extensive (large area, low inputs per hectare, e.g. sheep grazing on hills).
| Type | Aim | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial arable | Sell crops | Wheat, East Anglia |
| Subsistence pastoral | Feed family | Fulani cattle, Sahel |
| Intensive | High yield per ha | Rice, Ganges delta |
| Extensive | Low input per ha | Sheep, Welsh hills |
Factors affecting farming
Physical factors set what is possible: temperature and growing season, rainfall, relief (steep slopes are hard to plough), and soil quality. Human factors decide what actually happens: capital (money for machines and fertiliser), labour, market demand, government policy and technology.
Food shortages and famine
Food insecurity has natural triggers (drought, flood, pests) and human ones (conflict, poverty, poor storage, war blocking aid). Case study — the Sahel and the 2011 Horn of Africa famine (Somalia): two failed rainy seasons produced the driest year in decades; crops failed and livestock died. But drought alone did not cause the famine — ongoing conflict blocked aid and trade, and poverty meant families had no reserves. Around 260,000 people died and millions needed food aid. The lesson examiners want: famine is rarely caused by weather alone; human factors turn a shortage into a disaster.
1) Two consecutive failed rains destroyed crops and pasture (1), so food and income collapsed (1). 2) Conflict prevented aid agencies reaching those in need (1), and widespread poverty meant no savings to buy imported food (1). A good answer links a physical cause to a human cause.
Raising output: the Green Revolution and sustainability
The Green Revolution introduced high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, irrigation and fertiliser, greatly raising output in countries such as India. But it needed costly inputs, favoured richer farmers and could damage soils. Sustainable approaches — crop rotation, appropriate technology, drip irrigation, agroforestry — aim to raise yields without ruining the land for the future.