Food production in the context of Farming

Green infrastructure or blue-green infrastructure refers to a network that provides the "ingredients" for solving urban and climatic challenges by building with nature. The main components of this approach include stormwater management, climate adaptation, the reduction of heat stress, increasing biodiversity, food production, better air quality, sustainable energy production, clean water, and healthy soils, as well as more human centered functions, such as increased quality of life through recreation and the provision of shade and shelter in and around towns and cities. Green infrastructure also serves to provide an ecological framework for social, economic, and environmental health of the surroundings. More recently scholars and activists have also called for green infrastructure that promotes social inclusion and equity rather than reinforcing pre-existing structures of unequal access to nature-based services.

Green infrastructure is considered a subset of "Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure", which is defined in standards such as SuRe, the Standard for Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure. However, green infrastructure can also mean "low-carbon infrastructure" such as renewable energy infrastructure and public transportation systems (See "low-carbon infrastructure"). Blue-green infrastructure can also be a component of "sustainable drainage systems" or "sustainable urban drainage systems" (SuDS or SUDS) designed to manage water quantity and quality, while providing improvements to biodiversity and amenity.

The food industry is a complex, global network of diverse businesses that supplies most of the food consumed by the world's population. The food industry today has become highly diversified, with manufacturing ranging from small, traditional, family-run activities that are highly labour-intensive, to large, capital-intensive and highly mechanized industrial processes. Many food industries depend almost entirely on local agriculture, animal farms, produce, and/or fishing.

It is challenging to find an inclusive way to cover all aspects of food production and sale. The UK Food Standards Agency describes it as "the whole food industry – from farming and food production, packaging and distribution, to retail and catering". The Economic Research Service of the USDA uses the term food system to describe the same thing, stating: "The U.S. food system is a complex network of farmers and the industries that link to them. Those links include makers of farm equipment and chemicals as well as firms that provide services to agribusinesses, such as providers of transportation and financial services. The system also includes the food marketing industries that link farms to consumers, and which include food and fiber processors, wholesalers, retailers, and foodservice establishments." The food industry includes:

Several chronologies in the archaeology of the Americas include an Archaic Period or Archaic stage etc. It is often sub-divided, for example into "Early", "Middle" and "Late", or alternatively "Lower" and "Upper", stages. The dates, and the characteristics of the period called "Archaic" vary between different parts of the Americas. Sometimes also referred to as the "Pre-Ceramic stage" or period, it followed the Lithic stage and was superseded by the Formative stage, or a Preformative stage. The typical broad use of the terms is as follows:

• In Mesoamerican chronology the Archaic runs from about 3500 BC to 1800 BC; sites include Coxcatlan Cave, Tehuacán, showing the development of maize.
• In the periodization of pre-Columbian Peru the term may not be used, replaced by the Pre-Ceramic.
• In the Caribbean islands, the Archaic Age ranges from 6000 BC and 500 BC, when the earliest human settlements were established. These early settlers came from Central or South America.
• In the North American chronology the North American Archaic period runs from around 11,500 to 3200 cal yr B.P. and is usually subdivided into three subperiods: Early Archaic (11,500-8900 cal yr B.P.), Middle Archaic (8900-5800 cal yr B.P.), and Late Archaic (5800-3200 cal yr B.P.).

Cultures of the Archaic Stage are at some point in the development of the technologies of pottery, weaving, and developed food production; normally they are becoming reliant on agriculture, unless reliant on seafood. Social organization is developing into permanent villages. In the early parts of the period, hunting is gradually replaced by gathering, as the megafauna hunted in the Lithic stage decline. By the end of the Archaic, in parts of South America, there is "a stable agricultural system utilized by people living in permanent villages with ceremonial architecture".

The Pastoral Neolithic (5000 BP - 1200 BP) refers to a period in Africa's prehistory, specifically Tanzania and Kenya, marking the beginning of food production, livestock domestication, and pottery use in the region following the Later Stone Age. The exact dates of this time period remain inexact, but early Pastoral Neolithic sites support the beginning of herding by 5000 BP. In contrast to the Neolithic in other parts of the world, which saw the development of farming societies, the first form of African food production was nomadic pastoralism, or ways of life centered on the herding and management of livestock. The shift from hunting to food production relied on livestock that had been domesticated outside of East Africa, especially North Africa. This period marks the emergence of the forms of pastoralism that are still present. The reliance on livestock herding marks the deviation from hunting-gathering but precedes major agricultural development. The exact movement tendencies of Neolithic pastoralists are not completely understood.

The term "Pastoral Neolithic" is used most often by archaeologists to describe early pastoralist periods in eastern Africa (also known as the "East African Neolithic"). In the Sahara, hunter-gatherers first adopted livestock (e.g., cattle, sheep, goats) in the eighth to seventh millennia BP. As the grasslands of the Green Sahara began drying out in the mid-Holocene, herders then spread into the Nile Valley and eastern Africa.

The causes of food going uneaten are numerous and occur throughout the food system, during production, processing, distribution, retail and food service sales, and consumption. Overall, about one-third of the world's food is thrown away. A similar amount is lost on top of that by feeding human-edible food to farm animals (the net effect wastes an estimated 1144 kcal/person/day). A 2021 meta-analysis, that did not include food lost during production, by the United Nations Environment Programme found that food waste was a challenge in all countries at all levels of economic development. The analysis estimated that global food waste was 931 million tonnes of food waste (about 121 kg per capita) across three sectors: 61 percent from households, 26 percent from food service and 13 percent from retail.

Wasted food is a major part of the impact of agriculture on climate change (it amounts to 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually) and other environmental issues, such as land use, water use and loss of biodiversity. Prevention of food waste is the highest priority, and when prevention is not possible, the food waste hierarchy ranks the food waste treatment options from preferred to least preferred based on their negative environmental impacts. Reuse pathways of surplus food intended for human consumption, such as food donation, is the next best strategy after prevention, followed by animal feed, recycling of nutrients and energy followed by the least preferred option, landfill, which is a major source of the greenhouse gas methane. Other considerations include unreclaimed phosphorus in food waste leading to further phosphate mining. Moreover, reducing food waste in all parts of the food system is an important part of reducing the environmental impact of agriculture, by reducing the total amount of water, land, and other resources used.

Several chronologies in the archaeology of the Americas include a Formative Period or Formative stage etc. It is often sub-divided, for example into "Early", "Middle" and "Late" stages.

The Formative is the third of five stages defined by Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips in their 1958 book Method and Theory in American Archaeology. Cultures of the Formative Stage are supposed to possess the technologies of pottery, weaving, and developed food production; normally they are very largely reliant on agriculture. Social organization is supposed to involve permanent towns and villages, as well as the first ceremonial centers. Ideologically, an early priestly class or theocracy is often present or in development.

Crofting (Scottish Gaelic: croitearachd) is a form of land tenure and small-scale food production peculiar to the Scottish Highlands, the islands of Scotland, and formerly on the Isle of Man. Within the 19th-century townships, individual crofts were established on the better land, and a large area of poorer-quality hill ground was shared by all the crofters of the township for grazing of their livestock. In the 21st century, crofting is found predominantly in the rural Western and Northern Isles and in the coastal fringes of the western and northern Scottish mainland.

The Third Pole, also known as the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan system (HKKH), is a mountainous region located in the west and south of the Tibetan Plateau. Part of High-Mountain Asia, it spreads over an area of more than 4.2 million square kilometres (1.6 million square miles) across nine countries, i.e. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Tajikistan, bordering ten countries. The area is nicknamed the "Third Pole" because its mountain glaciers and snowfields store more frozen water than anywhere else in the world after the Arctic and Antarctic polar caps. With the world's loftiest mountains, comprising all 14 peaks above 8,000 metres (26,000 ft), it is the source of 10 major rivers and forms a global ecological buffer.

The Third Pole area is rich with natural resources and consists of all or some of four global biodiversity hotspots. The mountain resources administer a wide range of ecosystem benefits and are the base for the drinking water, food production and livelihoods of the 220 million inhabitants of the region, as well as indirectly to the 1.5 billion people — one sixth of the world's population — living in the downstream river basins. Billions of people benefit from the food and energy produced in these river basins whose headwaters rely on meltwaters and precipitations that run off these mountains.

The Codex Alimentarius (Latin for 'Food Code') is a collection of internationally recognized standards, codes of practice, guidelines, and other recommendations published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO) of the United Nations relating to food, food production, food labeling, and food safety.

Food loss and waste is food that is discarded or otherwise lost uneaten. This occurs throughout the food system, during production, processing, distribution, retail and food service sales, and consumption. Overall, about one-third of the world's food is thrown away, and a similar proportion of calories is lost on top of that by feeding human-edible food to farm animals. A 2021 meta-analysis by the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that global food waste amounted to 931 million tonnes annually (about 121 kg per person) across three sectors: 61 percent from households, 26 percent from food service and 13 percent from retail.

Food waste is addressed through prevention (e.g. by food preservation), reuse (e.g. food donation), animal feed, or recycling. Discarding food in landfills is to be avoided because it is a major source of the greenhouse gas methane. Reducing food waste in all parts of the food system is an important part of reducing the environmental impact of agriculture, by reducing the total amount of water, land, and other resources used.

Agricultural expansion describes the growth of agricultural land (arable land, pastures, etc.) especially in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The agricultural expansion is often explained as a direct consequence of the global increase in food and energy requirements due to population growth (both which in turn have been attributed to agricultural expansion itself), with an estimated expectation of 10 billion people on Earth by end of this century. It is foreseen that most of the world's non-agrarian ecosystems (terrestrial and aquatic) will be affected adversely, from habitat loss, land degradation, overexploitation, and other problems. The intensified food (and biofuel) production will in particular affect the tropical regions.

High-mountain Asia (HMA) or High Asia is a high-elevation geographic region in central-south Asia that includes numerous cordillera and highland systems around the Tibetan Plateau, encompassing regions of East, Southeast, South and Central Asia. The region was orogenically formed by the continental collision of the Indian Plate into (and underneath) the Eurasian Plate.

According to NASA, the region is the "world's largest reservoir of perennial glaciers and snow outside of the Earth's polar ice sheets", and has been nicknamed the "Third Pole". Their meltwaters and runoffs form the headwaters of river systems that support the drinking water and food production of nearly 3 billion people, and hydrological and climate changes in the mountains affect "ecosystem services, agriculture, energy and livelihood" for all the surrounding areas. NASA has a High Mountain Asia Team (HiMAT) to study the region.