Primary Activities

Getting resources directly from nature: gathering, nomadic herding and ranching, the main types of farming and where they are found, co-operatives, and mining.

Key ideas

• Primary activities depend directly on the environment; their workers are called red-collar workers.
• Gathering gives products like chicle, cork and gums, but synthetic products have replaced many of them.
• Nomadic herders move with their animals for pasture and water (transhumance is the seasonal move to mountain pastures); commercial ranches are fenced, with one kind of animal, kept within the pasture’s carrying capacity.
• Subsistence farming: primitive (slash and burn) and intensive (tiny holdings, high yield per hectare, low output per worker) in monsoon Asia.
• Commercial farming: plantations, extensive grain farms (low yield per acre, high per person), mixed farming, dairy, Mediterranean farming and market gardening.
• In co-operative farming farmers pool resources while keeping their land; Denmark is the classic example.
• Minerals near the surface are mined open-cast (cheap, safe); deep ores need shaft mining.

Remember

Watch out

• Saying intensive subsistence farming has high output per worker (it has high yield per hectare, but low output per worker).
• Calling viticulture citrus growing (it is grapes).
• Mixing up nomadic herding (subsistence, moving) and ranching (commercial, fenced).

Worked example