Introduction to Agriculture in Extreme Environments

This chapter is about how agriculture (farming) thrives in environments that are termed inhospitable, harsh, or extreme. Innumerable natural physical (atmospheric) factors affect crops and their productivity. Some of the climate-related factors dealt with here are desertification, dust storms, snow, glacier lake overflows, floods, soil erosion, heat waves (e.g., Harmattan), droughts, and so on. The basis for calling a geographic location or terrain “extreme” depends on the factor(s) that impact it most. Global agricultural activity spans the latitudes from the Arctic Circle at 65°N in Scandinavia, Russia, and Greenland, to 63°S in Patagonia, South Africa, and Australia. There are regions most congenial to farming, marginally congenial, and those extremely inhospitable, that is, uncongenial, or harsh to crops. Several biotic factors impose severe restrictions on crops. For example, microbes, mainly dreaded fungal, bacterial, viral pathogens, and diverse insect pests that attack the crop. A few specific regions dealt are the Northern Great Plains (Canadian Prairies), the Atacama Desert, Patagonia, the North European Temperate plains including Scandinavia, the Thar Desert in South Asia, the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, and the Northern Territory in Australia.