Specialist farms are often denoted as such, thus a dairy farm, fish farm, poultry farm or mink farm. Ī farm may operate under a monoculture system or with a variety of cereal or arable crops, which may be separate from or combined with raising livestock. Modern units tend to specialize in the crops or livestock best suited to the region, with their finished products being sold for the retail market or for further processing, with farm products being traded around the world.Īn aerial photo of the Borgboda farm in Saltvik, ÅlandĪ farm may be owned and operated by a single individual, family, community, corporation or a company, may produce one or many types of produce, and can be a holding of any size from a fraction of a hectare to several thousand hectares. It may have started about 12,000 years ago with the domestication of livestock in the Fertile Crescent in western Asia, soon to be followed by the cultivation of crops. Subsequent step-changes in human farming practices were provoked by the British Agricultural Revolution in the 18th century, and the Green Revolution of the second half of the 20th century.įarming originated independently in different parts of the world, as hunter gatherer societies transitioned to food production rather than food capture. Farming spread from the Middle East to Europe and by 4,000 BC people that lived in the central part of Europe were using oxen to pull plows and wagons. It was the world's first historically verifiable revolution in agriculture.

The transition from hunter-gatherer to settled, agricultural societies is called the Neolithic Revolution and first began around 12,000 years ago, near the beginning of the geological epoch of the Holocene around 12,000 years ago.

įarming has been innovated at multiple different points and places in human history. Map of the world showing approximate centers of origin of agriculture and its spread in prehistory: the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP), the Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BP), and the New Guinea Highlands (9,000–6,000 BP), Central Mexico (5,000–4,000 BP), Northern South America (5,000–4,000 BP), sub-Saharan Africa (5,000–4,000 BP, exact location unknown), eastern North America (4,000–3,000 BP). In less developed countries, small farms are the norm, and the majority of rural residents are subsistence farmers, feeding their families and selling any surplus products in the local market. In Australia, some farms are very large because the land is unable to support a high stocking density of livestock because of climatic conditions. In Europe, traditional family farms are giving way to larger production units. In the United States, livestock may be raised on range, land and finished in feedlots and the mechanization of crop production has brought about a great decrease in the number of agricultural workers needed. Modern farms in developed countries are highly mechanized. Small farms with a land area of fewer than 2 hectares operate about 1% of the world's agricultural land, and family farms comprise about 75% of the world's agricultural land. There are about 570 million farms in the world, most of which are small and family-operated. In modern times the term has been extended so as to include such industrial operations as wind farms and fish farms, both of which can operate on land or sea. It includes ranches, feedlots, orchards, plantations and estates, smallholdings and hobby farms, and includes the farmhouse and agricultural buildings as well as the land. The name is used for specialized units such as arable farms, vegetable farms, fruit farms, dairy, pig and poultry farms, and land used for the production of natural fiber, biofuel and other commodities. Typical plan of a medieval English manor, showing the use of field stripsĪ farm (also called an agricultural holding) is an area of land that is devoted primarily to agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops it is the basic facility in food production.

Hobby farm 2