Key Concepts in Agriculture, Farming, and Industrial Production
Livestock Farming
Extensive Systems: Traditional or conventional animal production is essentially characterized by being part of natural ecosystems modified by humans.
Intensive Farming: In intensive livestock feedlot, cattle are generally kept in low-temperature conditions that have been created artificially in order to increase production.
Land Use and Farming Practices
Latifundio: A large estate is a large farm, also characterized by inefficient use of available resources.
Smallholder: Small plots refer to a country house with an extension so small that it is difficult to use.
Intensive Agriculture: A crop production system that makes extensive use of the means of production. This type of agriculture produces vast quantities of a single type of product in reduced spaces.
Extensive Agriculture: An agricultural production system that does not maximize short-term productivity of the soil with the use of chemicals, irrigation, or drainage, but rather, using natural resources present on the site.
Fallow: Fallow land is not planted for one or more growing cycles, with the aim of recovering and storing organic material and moisture.
Dehesa: A woodland of oak or cork, with a lower layer of grasslands or shrublands, where human activity has been intense, and is generally intended for livestock keeping.
Monoculture: Refers to very large plantations of trees or other plants of a single species, and causes wear of soil nutrients and erosion.
Herding: Defined as a form of pastoralism that is mobile, adapting the space to changing productivity zones. Nomadism differs from seasonal settlements that have a fixed core, and the population comes from practice.
Industrial Crops: Cultivation of species to obtain non-food products such as snuff and flax.
Sharecropping: The owner of a farm entrusts a person with that farmland in exchange for a share of the results.
Irrigation: Providing water to the soil to supply the plants’ needs so as to enhance growth.
Fishing and Aquaculture
Deep-Sea Fishing: Takes place offshore, with deeper craft and using some modern techniques. It is practiced for a period of time that is not very long.
Inshore Fishing: Done near the coast, with small boats and artisanal methods. It is practiced for a period of time not exceeding one day.
Aquaculture: The set of activities, skills, and expertise for growing aquatic plant and animal species.
Energy and Industry
Renewable Energy: Energy obtained from virtually inexhaustible natural sources, some for the immense amount of energy they contain, and others because they are able to regenerate by natural means.
Development Pole: Relatively small geographical areas in which the location of industrial activity is encouraged to boost economic activity in a wider geographic area.
Hydropower: Obtained from the use of kinetic and potential energy of the flow of rivers, waterfalls, and tides.
Equipment Industry: Strictly heavy industry is one that uses large amounts of heavy raw materials to transform them into semi-finished products.
Steel Industry: A treatment technique for iron ore to obtain different types of it or its alloys.
Thermal Power Station: A facility used for the generation of electricity from the energy released as heat, usually by burning fossil fuels such as natural gas or coal oil.
Metallurgical Industry: The science and techniques of obtaining and processing metals from ores, even non-metallic ones.
Raw Materials: Materials extracted from nature and transformed to produce consumer goods.
Sources of Energy: Natural elaborations of varying complexity from which human beings can draw energy to perform a particular job or get some use.
Sustainability
Sustainable Development: Development that can meet current needs without compromising the resources and ability of future generations.
Petrochemical Industry: The science and technology for petrochemistry. Petrochemistry is owned by or on industry that uses oil or natural gas as feedstock for the production of chemicals.