Blackwell Reference Online

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Agriculture was an important component of economic geography through the 1950s. Until that time, research on agriculture and industry within economic geography shared an empirical and descriptive approach strongly influenced by notions of environmental determinism (see Barnes, this volume). But with the rise of model-building and quantitative methods in the 1960s (see Plummer, this volume), the focus of economic geography shifted to studies of industry while studies of farming were shunted into the subfield of agricultural geography. Ironically, this was true even though agriculture provided an early foundation for the new methods of industrial analysis: indeed, two important sources of location theory in the mid-twentieth century - von Thünen's land-use model and Christaller's central place theory - were strongly based upon the study of German farming landscapes. In the ensuing decades, as agricultural topics became less important within economic geography, research in agricultural geography branched into two separate and distinct areas. The first continued the long-standing tradition of descriptive research by pursuing the study of regional classification and farm characterization. The other branch, meanwhile, began to adapt the techniques of location modeling to a wide range of farm-related research questions. The result was that studies of agriculture within geography were cast ... log in or subscribe to read full text