Agriculture in Extreme Environments

This new volume highlights the present status of farming regions that experience extreme environmental conditions, which pose special challenges to successful agricultural pursuits. These areas include extreme environments such as arid and semi-arid areas in North America, the Northern European Plains and Scandinavia, Patagonia, West Asia, North Africa, Australia, and Mongolia. It also looks at agriculture in some temperate environments, including the Northern European Plains and Scandinavia.

The author discusses how native vegetation and crops have endured the harsh conditions, adapted to them, and still yielded grains and fruits in these areas. He relates how ingenious farmers and agencies with expertise can produce richer harvests even in the most difficult terrains and under extreme environments. He explores how agriculture in some areas thrives on harsh, sandy desert terrain with low fertility soil, scanty organic fraction, and low soil/ambient moisture status, farming areas that suffer due to severe droughts, dust storms, high-speed and hot winds, and incessant desertification trends.

Each chapter covers a specific region that experiences extreme environments, first providing an introduction to the area and then providing detailed information on the natural physiography, climate, native vegetation, and environmental settings as well as the factors that generate the extreme environment and their impact on crops/livestock. Major natural resources discussed include topography, landscape and soils, water resources, and atmospheric factors such as gaseous composition, wind, dust photosynthetic radiation, temperature relative humidity, etc. A description of the native vegetation and crops that fit the environment is included also. Physical and biological factors that induce extreme environmental situations have been dealt with in detail for each chapter, such as soil degradation processes, soil erosion, soil crusting, lack of seedling establishment and crop stand, loss of soil fertility, snow storms, fog, frost and heavy downpours, dust storms, drought, heat waves, climate change, disease, and insect pests.

The author personally does not advocate for the rampant expansion of agrarian pursuits into these "marvels of nature," as they are repositories of some of the most valuable exotic as well as useful germplasm of innumerable botanical species and fauna, and disturbing them could be detrimental to the large-scale weather phenomena operating on earth. We perhaps need them, he conjectures, as much as the more fertile and high-input farming zones.

This informative volume will be useful to agricultural researchers and faculty as well as of interest to the general public who are interested in geography, agriculture, and environmental aspects.