Agricultural Land Use, Food Security, and Rural Landscapes

Introduction

Agriculture is the foundation of human civilization. For approximately ten thousand years, the human capacity to grow food in surplus has allowed the emergence of cities, specialization of labor, trade, writing, and everything else that we call civilized life. The study of agriculture in human geography examines not only where food is grown and what crops are cultivated, but also how land is organized and owned, why agricultural patterns take the shapes they do across the landscape, how rural communities are structured and how they are changing, and how the global food system distributes abundance and scarcity in profoundly unequal ways. AP Human Geography Unit 5 addresses these questions through several major conceptual frameworks, each of which illuminates a different dimension of the relationship between human societies and the land they cultivate.

The geographic study of agriculture is concerned above all with spatial patterns. Why is wheat grown on the Great Plains of the United States but not in the Amazon basin? Why do dairy farms cluster near major cities? Why does intensive subsistence rice cultivation dominate the lowlands of South and Southeast Asia while nomadic herding persists in the surrounding semi-arid zones? These patterns are not random. They are the product of physical geography, climate, soil, topography, and proximity to water, but they are equally products of economics, culture, history, land tenure, and political systems. Human geographers study the interaction of all these forces to explain why the agricultural map looks the way it does.

This article provides a comprehensive examination of the major themes in the geography of agriculture as they appear on the AP Human Geography examination and in contemporary academic geography. These themes include: the von Thunen model of agricultural land use and its modern applications; the classification of agricultural systems from subsistence to commercial; the role of land tenure in shaping agricultural practice; the dimensions and geography of food security; the structure and dynamics of the global food system; regional dietary patterns and the nutrition transition; rural settlement patterns; the challenges facing rural areas in a globalizing economy; and the principles and practices of sustainable agriculture.

Von Thunen's Model of Agricultural Land Use

Historical Background and Context

Johann Heinrich von Thunen (1783-1850) was a Prussian estate owner and economic thinker who developed what remains one of the most elegant and influential models in human geography. Born in Jever in the Duchy of Oldenburg, von Thunen managed a large agricultural estate called Tellow near Rostock in the Mecklenburg region of what is now northeastern Germany. He was not primarily an academic but rather a practical farmer who kept meticulous records of costs, yields, and transport over many decades. From this data, he developed the theoretical framework published in his landmark work, Der Isolierte Staat in Beziehung auf Landwirtschaft und Nationalokonomie, translated as The Isolated State in Relation to Agriculture and National Economy. The first volume appeared in 1826, and it represented the first systematic application of economic reasoning to the spatial organization of land use.