Agriculture - AP Environmental Science

Traditional subsistence agriculture provides enough food to support one family and occasionally a surplus to sell, trade, or store.

Shelterbelts do fix carbon and some trees do fix nitrogen, but the dominant ecological benefit is their limiting of wind-caused soil erosion. Shelterbelts mimic a forest ecosystem by diverting wind currents away from soil that is often exposed by tilling.

Tilling has the benefit of increasing permeability of the soil for water and creating favorable conditions for young seedlings. No-till farming does not have these benefits, but it does reduce the risk of soil erosion because tilling generally destroys preestablished root systems.

Mulching can actually provide habitat for slugs, while removing mulch and topsoil puts your fields at serious risk of soil depletion and eventual erosion. Flooding your fields is also ineffective and could jeopardize your existing crops (and soil health for that matter!). Finding and squishing every single pest might put a small dent in the crops lost, but how much is your time worth? Mixed cropping is the best option, because many pests are specialists and feed off certain crops (leafy greens, drupes, etc.). Some of your crops will suffer but not all of them.

Terracing creates level shelves on hillsides to hold water and soil for growing crops. This method can be very expensive. Rangelands are the areas of land that are grazed on by animals. A monoculture refers to the cultivation of a single crop or animal, while a polyculture involves the cultivation of multiple different types of crops and/or animals in a given area.

GMO stands for "genetically modified organisms.” Scientists have manipulated the genetic material of the organism to create more productive crops. GMO's combine traits from significantly different species, creating an organism that has never occurred in nature. The resultant organism is less stable and likely to be modified, creating toxins or other negative mutations. The benefits of using GMO's include higher crop yields, as well as cultivating crops needing less water that are able to grow in harsher climates.

The farmer should use a nonselective herbicide. We can narrow down the answer choices to herbicides because they are used to control plants and weeds. The question also states that there are multiple species of weeds that the farmer needs to control. This means the farmer should use a nonselective herbicide, which kills multiple species—rather than a selective herbicide that will only kill a certain plant species. Insecticides are the wrong answer choice because they control for insects, not plants.

IPM stands for "integrated pest management." IPM is a process that minimizes the impact of pests upon agricultural or natural areas that pose minimal risks to people or the environment. In this process farmers may shield disease prone species from pests by planting a barrier of healthy pest resistant crops in front of them.

The correct response is The Green Revolution. The father of this revolution was Norman Borlaug. He received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970s for his working in the Green Revolution, credited as saving a billion lives because of his involvement in the agricultural enhancements.

The correct response is Norman Borlaug. He is regarded as the "Father of the Green Revolution" and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. His work specialized in creating high-yielding varieties of crops, such as wheat, to increase the global food supply.

The correct response is polyculture. A polyculture describes a farm that grows more than one crop together on the same field. This is also referred to as diversified farming and intercropping. Subsistence farming is incorrect because this describes a farming who grows food for just his family. Since Greg has 1000 acres, this answer choice doesn't make sense. Monoculture describes a farmer who grows only one crop.

The correct response is over-nutrition. Children that face over-nutrition eat more daily calories than are necessary for health. There is not enough evidence to suggest any specific nutritional deficiency, especially in an upper class child.

The correct response is diversified farming. All of the other answer choices involving degrading the landscape, whereas diversified farming restores the landscape's nutrients by cycling the nutrients of the land in a proportional manner, rather than exhausting a specific nutrient/resource by exercising intensive farming.

The correct response is subsistence agriculture. The definition of subsistence agriculture is planting enough for just your family. We don't that what she is doing is sustainable - she could be dumping chemicals and destroying biodiversity for all we know. The key is that we know that she is planting just enough food for her family.

The correct response is monoculture farming. Mono = one. Gary only plants 1 crop at a time so his farm is a monoculture. If he planted more than one crop at a time, then you could call his farm a polyculture (poly = many) or diversified farming. If he was interested in managing his farm for biodiversity, then you could say he is engaging in agroecology farming.

A plant almost never uses as much fertilizer as it is given, and in the case of synthetic fertilizers especially, the nutrients are also often over-applied for efficiency's sake. This over-application leads to fertilizer buildup in the soil as more and more goes unused. When certain concentrations of the fertilizers are reached, the chemicals in the fertilizer form salts, leading to what we call soil salinization, which is a condition where plants can't grow very well.

While tilling aerates the soil, which makes planting easier, it does so at the cost of killing many soil organisms and disturbing the soil microbiome, leading to soil microorganism death as well. Tilling also increases soil erodibility so wind and other disturbances are more likely to erode away the topsoil.

A very large collection of the same species, such as a large field of one type of crop only, is extremely attractive to species-specific pests, which only see a great deal of food. This means monoculture farmers need to use a lot of pesticide. Such collections are also very vulnerable to disease; because all of the plants in a field are identical, this means a single fungus or virus can infect them all very easily. Finally, every plant needs the same kind of nutrient, which means they use up what's in the soil very quickly. This means monoculture farmers also need to use lots of fertilizer.

During the 1930s and 40s, "miracle" rice and dwarf wheat varieties were developed by Norman Borlaug in the countries named. The rest of the innovations listed came later.