Intensive Agriculture

Intensive agriculture is a farming approach that seeks to maximize output per unit of land through heavy inputs of labor, capital, machinery, irrigation, fertilizer or pesticide, in contrast to extensive agriculture's approach of using more land with a lower input per unit area. It underlies most of the twentieth century's yield gains and much of the Green Revolution's own package of inputs, at the cost of the soil, water and biodiversity impacts, land degradation, agricultural runoff, monoculture risk, that intensive input use can bring.