Food Security
Where all or most of the people in the country have daily access to enough nutritious food to live active and healthy lives.
Food Insecurity
People living with chronic hunger and poor nutrition, which threatens their ability to lead healthy and productive lives.
Famine
This occurs when there is a severe shortage of food in an area and which can result in mass starvation, many deaths, economic chaos, and social disruption.
Overnutrition
Occurs when food energy intake exceeds energy use and causes excess body fat.
Irrigation
Supplying water to crops by artificial means.
Industrialized or high-put Agriculture
A type of agriculture that uses heavy equipment and large amounts of financial capital, fossil fuels, water, commercial inorganic fertilizers, and pesticides to produce single crops, or monocultures.
Plantation Agriculture
A form of industrialized agriculture used primarily in tropical less-developed countries growing cash crops like bananas, soybeans, sugarcane, coffee, palm oil, and vegetables mostly for export to more-developed countries.
Hydroponics
Involves growing plants by exposing their roots to a nutrient-rich water solution instead of soil, usually inside of a greenhouse.
Traditional Subsistence Agriculture
Agriculture that supplements energy from the sun with the labor of humans and draft animals to produce enough crops for a farm family's survival, with little left over to sell or store as a reserve for hard times.
Polyculture
Cultivating several crops on the same plot simultaneously.
Slash-and-Burn Agriculture
A type of subsistence agriculture that involves burning and clearing small plots in tropical forests, growing a variety of crops until the soil is depleted, then shifting to other plots to begin the process again.
Green Revolution
The increase in global food production since 1950 from using high-input industrialized agriculture to increase crop yields.
Fishery
A concentration of particular aquatic species suitable for commercial harvesting in a given ocean area or inland body of water.
Aquaculture
The practice of raising marine and freshwater fish in freshwater ponds or underwater cages in coastal or open ocean waters.
Desertification
Occurs when the productive potential of topsoil falls by 10% or more because of a combination of prolonged drought and human activities such as overgrazing and deforestation that reduce or degrade topsoil.
Salinization
A process that degrades soil from repeated applications of irrigation water in dry climates which leads to the gradual accumulation of salt in the upper layers of soil.
Waterlogging
Where water accumulates underground and gradually raises the water table, especially when farmers apply large amounts of irrigation water in an effort to leach salts deeper into the soil, eventually killing plants.
Pest
Any species that interferes with human welfare by competing with us for food, invading lawns and gardens, destroying building materials, spreading disease, invading ecosystems, or simply being a nuisance.
Pesticides
Chemicals used to kill or control populations of organisms we consider undesirable.
Integrated Pest Management (IPM)
A program where each crop and its pests are evaluated as parts of an ecological system to form a control plan that uses a combination of cultivation, biological/chemical tools, and applied in a coordinated process tailored to each situation.
Soil Conservation
Involves using a variety of methods to reduce topsoil erosion and to restore soil fertility, mostly by keeping the land covered with vegetation.
Organic Fertilizer
Fertilizer from plant and animal materials.
Manufactured Inorganic Fertilizer
Fertilizer produced from various materials, which are mined from the earth's crust.
Animal Manure
A type of organic fertilizer that uses dung and urine from cattle, horeses, poultry, and other farm animals.
Green Manure
Fertilizer that consists of freshly cut or growing vegetation that is plowed into the topsoil to increase the organic matter and humus available to the next crop.
Compost
Fertilizer produced when microorganisms in topsoil break down organic matter such as leaves, crop residues, food wastes, paper, and wood in the presence of oxygen.