Short answers, pulled from the story.
Intensive farming, also called intensive agriculture, conventional, or industrial agriculture, is a type of agriculture with higher levels of input and output per unit of agricultural land area. It is characterized by a low fallow ratio and higher use of inputs such as capital, labour, agrochemicals, and water, producing higher crop yields per unit of land.
Intensive farming uses more inputs such as capital, labour, agrochemicals, and water per unit of land to achieve higher yields, while extensive farming uses fewer inputs over more land. In intensive animal farming, concentrated feed is brought to seldom-moved animals or animals are repeatedly moved to fresh forage, increasing food and fiber yields per unit land area.
A concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO, is the process of raising livestock in confinement at high stocking density, sometimes holding up to hundreds of thousands of cows, hogs, turkeys, or chickens, often indoors. The designation resulted from the 1972 U.S. Federal Clean Water Act, after the Environmental Protection Agency identified certain animal feeding operations as point source groundwater polluters.
The Green Revolution transformed farming in many developing countries by spreading miracle seeds, pesticides, irrigation, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. In the 1970s, scientists created high-yielding varieties of maize, wheat, and rice, including Norin 10 wheat developed by Orville Vogel and the rice variety IR8 from the International Rice Research Institute.
Industrial agriculture is one of the main drivers of global warming, accounting for 14 to 28 percent of net greenhouse gas emissions, and it uses huge amounts of water, energy, and industrial chemicals. Nitrogen compounds traveling down the Mississippi degrade coastal fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico, creating oceanic dead zones, and agrochemicals may be involved in colony collapse disorder among bees.
Crop irrigation accounts for 70 percent of the world's fresh water use. Flood irrigation is the oldest and most common type but distributes water unevenly, while drip irrigation is the most expensive and least used but delivers water to plant roots with minimal losses.
The System of Rice Intensification is a recent development in intensive rice production, developed in 1983 by the French Jesuit Father Henri de Laulanié in Madagascar. By 2013 the number of smallholder farmers using the system had grown to between 4 and 5 million.