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Hey Steemians

Agriculture has its fair share of neat stuff and buzz words, but this week for the Agriculture Word of the Week challenge, I chose Cash Crop. Unlike crops that you grow purely to keep your household fed, Cash Crops are raised specifically to sell on local or global markets. You see, these bad boys are how most farmers actually make money from farming!

So, What Exactly Is a Cash Crop?

Basically, if you’re growing anything on a large piece of land and the reason you're doing it is to sell it in order to make money, you’re growing a cash crop. That means pretty much the only things that DON’T fall into this category are things you’re growing for yourself or your own family to consume – we call those subsistence crops (you might grow a few acres of vegetables for that.

These would include cocoa, coffee, rubber trees, cotton, and oil palm. Cash crops are critical for millions of people living in the developing world, in small, rural communities, and, while this generates cash in farmers’ pockets, it’s also often the main way in which developing countries can gain vital foreign exchange through exports.

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• Economic Independence: When you produce cash crops, they essentially give people the ability to get money directly into their own pockets. This income allows people to provide for themselves and their families in so many ways, including paying school fees for kids, building better housing, purchasing better farming equipment, and moving themselves out of poverty.
• Industrial Ingredients: A lot of products you use on a daily basis start off as cash crops! Our favorite chocolate comes from cash crop cocoa, clothes that we wear are made from cash crop cotton, and the tires on the cars we ride around in are made from the rubber trees we cash crop.
• Job Opportunities: A Cash Crop business is a large industry that gives employment to tons of different kinds of people. In addition to the farmer who grows cash crops, you have the workers needed to help grow, harvest and pack those cash crops, the truck drivers needed to transport them to processing factories, and finally, the factory workers.

The Fine Balance of Growing Cash Crops

The good thing about growing cash crops is that they are really profitable. But the fact that their prices are so unpredictable and there is always a lot of competition for space and market access to cash crops does cause the world of agriculture to try and strike the fine balance that comes when the focus has to be on cash crops, or it has to be on food production. But more and more in agriculture the farmers are finding themselves trying to grow some money to provide for themselves, and grow some food for everyone to eat as well.

Thanks for reading my post I'm inviting @mesola, @rad-austine and @ninpenda to participate.