Agricultural Systems and Practices: Intensive, Extensive, and More
Agricultural Systems
Extensive Exploitation: Farming large areas with low yields per unit, requiring less investment and sometimes using traditional techniques like fallow. Common in Spain for cereal cultivation.
Intensive Agriculture: Obtaining high yields of quality products in a small space using techniques like seed selection, fertilizers, irrigation, and crop rotation. Expensive but high-yielding, used in areas with limited arable land and large populations.
Polyculture: Cultivating several different plants on the same farm, intensive or extensive. Ideal for self-sufficiency and offsetting gains and losses.
Monoculture: Cropping system focused on a single product, often commercialized. Examples in Spain include olive cultivation and vineyards.
Soil Management and Land Tenure
Crop Rotation: Alternating crops to prevent land degradation, replacing fallow with forage or industrial crops to boost livestock and food production.
Fallow: Traditional practice of letting land rest to recover nutrients, now disappearing.
System of Land Tenure: Distinguishes between ownership and management. Includes direct holding (owner and employer are the same) and indirect holding (leasing and sharecropping).
Leasing: Transferring land use for rent, common in Andalusia and Extremadura.
Sharecropping: The worker pays the owner with a portion of the production. Historically widespread in Spain, now diminished.
Land Characteristics and Irrigation
Minifundio: Small plots, often for self-consumption, typical in Northern Spain and Valencia.
Latifundio: Large estates with inefficient resource use, often exceeding 100 hectares in Spain.
Irrigated Agriculture: Providing water to crops artificially, requiring significant investment and infrastructure. Common crops include fruits, rice, and vegetables.
Rainfed Agriculture: Relying on precipitation, common crops include cereals and the Mediterranean trilogy (grapes, olives, wheat).
Agricultural Techniques and Transformations
Tillage: Preparing land for cultivation, often involving clearing forested areas.
Mechanization: Replacing manual labor with machinery for increased productivity, a process ongoing since the 18th century.
Confiscation: State appropriation of land for resale, historically impacting land ownership in Spain.
Land Consolidation: Reducing the number of plots per farm, a policy implemented in Spain since the 1950s.
Crops, Settlements, and Economic Units
Mediterranean Cultures: Traditionally dry crops (wheat, vines, olives), now diversified with irrigation.
Huerta: Irrigated farms growing grapes, fruits, vegetables, and legumes, common in the Spanish Levant.
Cultivation Under Plastic: Covering crops with plastic to retain moisture, common in southern Spain.
Rural Exodus: Migration from rural to urban areas.
Concentrated Rural Settlement: Houses arranged in villages, characteristic of flat areas.
Dispersed Rural Settlement: Scattered houses and farms, characteristic of humid and mountainous areas.
Industrial Crops: Non-food crops like cotton and flax.
Plot Culture: Minimum surface land unit.
Farm: Independent economic unit producing agricultural products.