Explain the characteristics of extensive commercial grain farming with its distribution.

Answer: Extensive commercial grain farming is large-scale, highly mechanised cultivation of grains, mainly wheat, for the market, in the temperate grasslands.

Characteristics:

• Large farms: farms are very large, often 240 to 1,600 hectares or more, because land is plentiful and population sparse.
• Mechanisation: tractors, combine harvesters, seed drills and aircraft for spraying are used, since labour is scarce and costly.
• Single crop: wheat is the main crop; barley, oats, maize and flax are also grown.
• Low yield per hectare but high yield per worker: inputs per unit of land are low, but each farmer produces a huge surplus.
• Commercial: almost the whole produce is sold in national and international markets; grain is stored in elevators and moved by railways and ships.
• Seasonal: usually one crop a year because winters are very cold; spring wheat is grown where winters are severe.
• Problems: monoculture, soil exhaustion, soil erosion, dependence on world prices, droughts and pests.

Distribution:

• Prairies of North America (USA and Canada).
• Pampas of Argentina (South America).
• Steppes of Eurasia (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan).
• Downs of Australia (Murray–Darling basin).
• Veld of South Africa and Canterbury plains of New Zealand.

These are mid-latitude temperate grasslands with level land, fertile chernozem (black) soils, moderate rainfall of about 50–75 cm, and sparse population.