Intensive Agriculture

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Group progress report individual meetings
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Water - Keystone element

• Capture
• Diversion
• Utilization
• Renewal

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Intensive Agriculture

• From extensive to intensive food procurement
  strategies

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Transformation of natural cycles

• Persistent or permanent landscape modification
• Conscious selection modification
• Water management
• Sedentarisation
• Crop rotation versus swidden cycles

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• Shifting worldview
• New religious systems
• Diverse sources of energy inputs
• Mixed animal and plant systems
• New forms of social systems
• Social specialization and the emergence of
  agrarian societies
  
• Complex integrated systems
• Administration and authority structures emerge
• Geographic differentiation town and city
• Trade and transportation
• Reduction of leisure time

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Social differentiation

• Labour based class systems
• Wealth differentiation
• Land owners - land workers - landless

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Variants

• Arboriculture (breadfruit)
• Agropastoralism
• Agriculture
• Mixed strategies
• Self-sufficiency Trade systems

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The production - social change feedback loop

• Self sufficiency and social inter-dependency
  linked in agricultural evolution
  
• surplus exchange stratification
• Labour needs in intensive agriculture create
  production demands which lead to labour needs

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Why Intensify?

• Changes in population
• Changes in policy
• Changes in market
• Changes in supply-demand
• How?
• Increase labour inputs or efficiency
• Increase land productivity
• Constant inputs from non-natural sources

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Energy budget changes

• Energy budget energy yield - energy input
• Human inputs (time and labour) increase
• Output also increases
• Indirect costs are high
• Mechanical inputs
• More productive than human or animal energy
• Indirect costs lower but require economies of
  scale to be viable
  

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• Renewable energy sources standing biomass
• Animals, trees, plants
• Non-renewable energy sources (fossil fuels)
• of each source used is an indicator of degree
  of industrialization and intensity of production

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Energy types and sources influence organization
of production

• Mixed agricultural systems and human inputs
• Monocroping and mechanization
• Organization of time

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Peasantry Surplus

• Taxation, rent, corvée, sharecropping
• Political organization
• Cooperatives
• Religious movements and enclaves
• Revolution
• Self-sufficiency to market engagement
• Capitalization and efficiency
• Food sources and security

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Tamang case study

• Relatively self-sufficient
• Mixed herding and agriculture
• Mixed Buddhist and shamanic practices
• Highly egalitarian
• Clan and neighborhood social organization with
  exogamy
  

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• Good example of a vertical ecology
• Lots of ecological variation with altitude
• 3 vertical zones
• Lowest-maize and millet (5300-6000ft)
• Middle-maize, potatoes, millet, barley
  (6-7000ft)
  
• Highest-potatoes and wheat (7-8500ft)

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Gleaning
Jean-François Millet
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