Resources and agriculture

What this heading covers

What counts as a resource, how resources are classified, and the oldest and largest use people make of the land. The two topics are set together because agriculture is where the classification becomes concrete: soil is a natural resource, the farmer is a human resource, the tractor is human-made, and the crop depends on all three.

What makes something a resource

A resource is anything that has utility and can be used.

The definition carries a point the paper tests directly: utility is not a property of the substance alone. Something becomes a resource when human knowledge, technology and access make it usable.

• Coal underground was not a resource before anyone could mine it and knew what to burn it for.
• Uranium was an awkward mineral until the twentieth century.
• Wind has been a resource for sailing for millennia and for electricity only recently.

So resources are made as much as found, and the thing that makes them is people. That is the reasoning behind calling human beings the ultimate resource, and a question asking why wants this rather than a sentiment about human worth.

The three kinds

Kind	What it is	Examples
Natural	Drawn from nature, used with little modification	Air, water, soil, minerals, forests, sunlight
Human-made	Made by people from natural resources	Buildings, roads, machinery, bridges, technology
Human	People themselves — number, skill, education, health	A trained teacher, a skilled weaver, an engineer

The distinction between human and human-made is asked, and the words are close enough to be swapped under pressure. Human resources are people. Human-made resources are things.

Natural resources divide again

By renewability

	Renewable	Non-renewable
Replenished	On a human timescale	Not, in human terms
Examples	Solar, wind, water, forests, soil (slowly)	Coal, petroleum, natural gas, minerals

The caution the syllabus adds, and a good answer includes: renewable does not mean inexhaustible. A forest regrows only if cut slower than it grows; groundwater recharges only if drawn slower than it refills. Renewable resources are exhaustible when used faster than they renew.

By development

• Actual resources — surveyed, quantity known, being used now.
• Potential resources — known to exist but not yet usable, for want of technology, access or demand.

By distribution

• Ubiquitous — found everywhere, such as air.
• Localised — found in particular places, such as copper or coal.

Conservation and sustainable development

• Conservation is using resources carefully so that they last — avoiding waste, reusing, recycling, using less.
• Sustainable development is meeting present needs without preventing future generations from meeting theirs.

They are not the same, and a question offering one definition for the other is common. Conservation is a practice; sustainable development is a principle about development itself — it does not say stop developing, it says develop in a way the future can afford.

The three principles usually named with it: respect for all life, intergenerational fairness, and limiting resource use to what can be replenished.

Agriculture

Subsistence and commercial

• Subsistence farming produces mainly for the farmer's own family. Surplus, if any, is small.
• Commercial farming produces for sale, usually with more land, capital and inputs.

The four types met at this level

Type	What it is	Where
Shifting cultivation	A patch is cleared and burnt, cultivated briefly until fertility falls, then abandoned and a new patch cleared	Forested hill areas; called jhum in north-east India
Intensive subsistence	Small holdings, much labour, high yields per unit of land	Densely populated monsoon Asia — the Ganga plain, the deltas
Plantation	A single crop, large estate, heavy capital, grown for the market	Tea in Assam and north Bengal, coffee in Karnataka, rubber in Kerala
Mixed farming	Crops and livestock together on the same farm	Europe, North America, parts of India

Shifting cultivation is also called slash-and-burn, and it is the one with the most names — jhum in the north-east, podu in Andhra, and others elsewhere. A question listing local names is asking whether you recognise them as one practice.

Intensive subsistence is the one to associate with India's plains: small plots, many hands, two or three crops a year, high yield per hectare and low yield per worker. That last pairing is the distinction from commercial farming, where it is the other way round.

What each major crop needs

Crop	Temperature	Rainfall	Soil
Rice	High	High (or irrigation)	Clayey, water-retaining
Wheat	Moderate, cool growing season	Moderate	Loamy, well-drained
Cotton	High	Moderate	Black (regur)
Tea	Warm, moist	High, well distributed	Sloping ground, good drainage — it cannot stand standing water
Coffee	Warm	High	Well-drained slopes, shade
Jute	High	High	Alluvial, well-drained — the Ganga–Brahmaputra delta
Sugarcane	Hot and humid	Moderate to high	Deep rich loam

Two that are set often: cotton with black soil, and tea needing slopes — the reason being drainage, since the roots rot in waterlogged ground, which is why tea grows on hillsides and rice in flooded fields.

Farming depends on climate, soil, water, terrain, technology and markets — which is the people-and-environment relationship the subject is about, in its most practical form.

A question of the kind the paper sets

Coal lying deep underground before mining technology existed was: (a) not a resource at all (b) a potential resource (c) an actual resource (d) a renewable resource

(b) a potential resource.

This is the definition question in disguise. The coal existed and was known to exist, but could not be used — which is exactly potential. It became an actual resource when technology made it usable.

(a) is tempting because of the rule that utility makes a resource, but the classification already has a word for "exists, not yet usable", and the question is checking that you have it. (d) is wrong twice over: coal is non-renewable.

Mistakes that cost marks here

• Swapping human and human-made resources. People against things.
• Treating renewable as inexhaustible. A forest cut faster than it grows is exhausted.
• Giving the conservation definition for sustainable development, or the reverse.
• Calling an unusable known deposit "not a resource" when the word is potential.
• Pairing cotton with alluvial soil. It is black soil.
• Forgetting that tea needs drainage and slopes, which is why it is not grown in paddy country.
• Calling intensive subsistence farming commercial because the yields are high. The test is whom it is grown for.
• Treating shifting cultivation and its local names as different practices.

In one line

Utility and the knowledge to use it make a resource, so people are the resource that makes the others; natural resources are renewable or not and renewable does not mean endless; conservation is a practice and sustainable development a principle about the future; and farming is subsistence or commercial by whom it feeds, with cotton on black soil and tea on slopes.

In the classroom

The resource definition is best taught backwards. Hold up something ordinary — a stone, a plastic bottle, a handful of soil — and ask what would have to be true for it to be worth money. Children arrive at somebody has to want it and be able to use it, which is the definition, and they arrive at it before the word.

For agriculture, the crop table is dead until it is local. What grows in the fields around the school, what the soil looks like in the hand, when it is sown and when it is cut — a child who has watched one crop's year will read the table as a description of something they know rather than as nine rows to memorise.