Farmers practice extensive agricult

Farmers practice extensive agriculture where land is plentiful, rainfall is light, and the soil is not especially fertile. Extensive agriculture requires relatively little investment in equipment and supplies per unit of land and each unit yields a relatively low return. The vast sheep ranches of Australia and the Western United States are examples of extensive agriculture. A ranch may cover several thousand hectares or more and raise thousands of sheep, but each animal needs about 1.6 hectares of land for grazing. The return per unit of land is therefore low and may be only one-hundredth of the return per hectare from intensive farming.