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The small farm in Swiss mountains. The land here is mostly rock and the slopes are very steep - likely unusable for agriculture, but can provide productive conditions for pigs

Extensive farming (as opposed to intensive farming) is an agricultural production system that uses little inputs on vast areas of land, such as the Great Plains.

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.

Geography

Extensive farming is found in the mid-latitude sections of most continents, as well as in desert regions where water for cropping is not available. The nature of extensive farming means it requires less rainfall than intensive farming. The farm is usually large in comparison with the numbers working and money spent on it. In most parts of Western Australia, pastures are so poor that only one sheep to the square mile can be supported ¹

Just as the demand has led to the basic division of cropping and pastoral activities, these areas can also be subdivided depending on the regions rainfall, vegetation type and agricultural activity within the area and the many other parentheses related to this data.

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Advantages

Extensive farming has a number of advantages over intensive farming:

1. Less labour per unit areas is required to farm large areas, especially since expensive alterations to land (like terracing) are completely absent.
2. Mechanisation can be used more effectively over large, flat areas.
3. Greater efficiency of labour means generally lower costs.
4. Animal welfare is generally improved because animals are not kept in stifling conditions.
5. Lower requirements of inputs such as fertilisers.
6. If animals are grazed on pastures native to the locality, there is less likely to be problems with exotic species.

Disadvantages

Extensive farming can have the following problems²:

1. Yields tend to be much lower than with intensive farming
2. Animals are not fed continuously and growth is restricted (e.g. in droughts).
3. Large land requirements limit the habitat of wild species (in some cases, even very low stocking rates can be dangerous).
4. Susceptibity to the vagaries of climate can cause long-term ecological damage if drought or flood alters topography or erodes soils.

Rural Life

see Rural sociology

References

See also

• Intensive farming
• Canadian Wheat Board
• Forest gardening
• Permaculture
• Polyculture