Horticulture is distinguished from agriculture by scale of production, specialization, and commercialization. Agriculture features in industrialized societies supplying food to large urban populations. It is, in some regards, the reverse of horticulture. It involves the farming of large fields, usually under a monocrop (all wheat, potatoes, beans, mushroom, etc.), whereas the gardens of horticulturists usually feature intercropping, the mixing up of several different crops, as opposed to their segregation in separate rows or plots, for which there are sound ecological reasons (e.g., pest and disease control, maximizing nutrient and water availability, increasing photosynthetic efficiency, exploiting micro-environmental variations to best effect, and so on).
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Agriculture features highly mechanized production techniques, whereas horticultural societies rely more on human labor and animal drought power. Farmers in agricultural systems meet few of their own subsistence requirements, specializing in the large-scale production of a few foodstuffs for sale on the market. They engage in agribusiness, intensive production making wide use of inputs to boost yields, frequently obtained from off-farm and industrially manufactured (inorganic fertilizers, biocides, etc.). The term horticulture has a quite different meaning in urban-industrial societies, which can confuse the unwary. It refers to the intensive production, often under artificial glasshouse conditions, of high-value crops, such as early vegetables, salads, and flowers by commercial growers.
Other food production regimes from which horticultural societies are distinguished include gatherer-hunters and pastoralists, which support lower population densities (Forde 1934), industrialized urban ones having higher densities. These categories were bequeathed to us by Victorian scholars who thought of them comprising an evolutionary hierarchy, putting horticultural societies somewhere in the middle of the range between the gatherer-hunter and industrial poles. This scheme continues to inform thinking to the current day (as evidenced by entries in this encyclopedia), and underpins notions of development conceived as facilitating the passage of communities to the urban-industrial pole. Anthropologists continue to use it, although unhappy with the continued evolutionary implications, arguing that we should not judge urban-industrial life, notably liberal market democracy, as the superior socioeconomic order to which all human beings should aspire. It is an approximate classification scheme.
At some ill-defined point, populations are thought to manage their natural resources sufficiently closely to move beyond gatherer-hunting to farming, this is accompanied by a more sedentary lifestyle. They qualify as horticultural societies when they emphasize crop cultivation over animal herding, although mixed arable and livestock farming is common. The label horticultural society covers a wide range of different subsistence regimes and sociocultural orders. The term is more commonly used in North America than Europe, where instead of lumping these societies together, it is more usual to distinguish the different agronomic regimes that comprise horticultural orders.
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