Extensive farming or extensive agriculture (as opposed to intensive farming) is an agricultural production system that uses small inputs of labour, fertilizers, and capital, relative to the land area being farmed.
Extensive farming most commonly refers to sheep and cattle farming in areas with low agricultural productivity, but can also refer to large-scale growing of wheat, barley and other grain crops in areas like the Murray-Darling Basin. Here, owing to the extreme age and poverty of the soils, yields per hectare are very low, but the flat terrain and very large farm sizes mean yields per unit of labour are high. Nomadic herding is an extreme example of extensive farming, where herders move their animals to use feed from occasional rainfalls.
Read more about Extensive Farming: Geography, Advantages, Disadvantages
Famous quotes containing the words extensive and/or farming:
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)