What is extensive farming?

Question

What is extensive farming?

Answer 1

Farming large acreages, typically without fertilizer or irrigation would be non-intensive extensive farming. Now a lot of extensive farming would also be classified as ranching.

But there are many very large farms that are intensively farmed. The intent of the term is to distinguish between intensive farming and non-intensive, so we usually do not include large intensive farms as extensive.

Answer 2

Extensive farms have few inputs on a large area of land. An example is a hill sheep farm where perhaps only one farmer will look after a large number of sheep, which do not take a lot of looking after