Agricultural Science 2019 Jamb Examination

Agriculture provides food for human consumption, creates employment opportunities for a large population, and supplies raw materials to industries while serving as a market for their finished products. However, lack of good food is not an importance of agriculture but rather a problem that occurs when agriculture is neglected or underdeveloped.

Subsistence agriculture is typically practiced on small farms by peasant farmers, mainly relying on family labor. Farmers often lack access to pest and disease control measures, which affects productivity. However, it does not typically require both skilled and unskilled labor because it is a low-technology farming system with little specialization. Therefore, option D does not align with subsistence farming.

The freehold system is a recognized form of land tenure in which an individual has permanent ownership rights to a piece of land. The other options listed are not legitimate tenure systems and therefore do not apply.

Branches of agriculture include crop production, animal husbandry, forestry, fishery, and agricultural economics. Kidding refers to the act of a goat giving birth, which is an animal process but not a branch of agriculture. Thus, it does not qualify as one of the recognized branches.

The demand for agricultural produce is generally inelastic because food is a necessity. People must consume food regardless of price changes, so even if prices rise, the demand does not fall significantly. Similarly, when prices fall, the demand does not increase drastically, since consumption is limited by human needs.

Rural farmers often lack access to formal credit facilities such as banks or government schemes due to collateral requirements and bureaucratic processes. As a result, they usually resort to local money lenders, who are more accessible though they often charge high interest rates.

Peasant farmers generally rely on family labor because of limited financial resources to hire workers. Family members participate in farm operations such as planting, weeding, and harvesting, making it the most common type of labor available to them.

In economics, the four factors of production are land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Land earns rent, labor earns wages, capital earns interest, and entrepreneurship earns profit. Entrepreneurs organize and manage the other factors of production, and their compensation for risk-taking and innovation is profit.

Depreciation is the gradual loss in value of assets such as farm structures and machinery due to usage, aging, or obsolescence. Appreciation refers to an increase in value, capitalization is converting income into capital value, and salvage value is the estimated residual value of an asset after its useful life.

Soil texture refers to the relative proportion of different sizes of soil particles, namely sand, silt, and clay, within a soil sample. These particles determine properties such as water-holding capacity, drainage, and aeration. The classification into sandy, loamy, or clayey soils is based on texture, making option C the correct definition.