AP® Human Geography · Unit 5 · Topic 5.8
The Von Thunen Model
Von Thunen's model shows that farmers choose what to grow based on how far they sit from the market, balancing a crop's value, how fast it spoils, and what it costs to transport it there.
Every crop has a profit margin that shrinks with distance: price minus production cost minus transport cost. Transport cost rises with distance, so profit falls as a farm sits farther from the market. Perishable, bulky, or low-value goods lose money fast over distance, so they have to stay close. High-value or storable goods can absorb a longer haul. Von Thunen, working from a single isolated market town on a flat, featureless plain with equal soil and no rivers, showed that this simple math sorts land use into concentric rings. Closest in sits market gardening and dairy, trading on perishability, not price. Next comes forest, bulky and heavy for its value, once essential for fuel and timber. Then comes grain and field crops, valuable enough to tolerate a longer trip. Furthest out is ranching and livestock grazing, since animals can walk themselves to market, cutting transport cost to nearly zero per unit of land.
Break the flat plain with a navigable river and the rings stretch into ovals along the waterway, since water transport is cheap and fast compared to carting goods overland. Towns and transport routes bend the pattern the same way in reality. Refrigeration and trucking cut the cost of moving perishables, so dairy and produce no longer need to hug the city, and rings loosen or vanish entirely in developed regions.
The model still matters because it isolates one force, distance and transport cost, and shows how that force alone shapes land use. Real landscapes layer in rivers, hills, trade policy, and technology, so they never form neat rings, but the underlying logic still explains why a vineyard sits near a city while cattle graze in distant range country.
Key terms
- Von Thunen model
- A model showing how distance from a market, through transport cost and perishability, sorts agricultural land use into concentric rings.
- Perishability
- How quickly a good spoils or loses value, which determines how close to market it must be produced.
- Economic rent
- The profit per unit of land left after subtracting production and transport costs from a crop's market price.
- Isolated state
- Von Thunen's simplifying assumption of a single market town on a flat, uniform plain with no rivers or other cities.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does von Thunen's model turn transport cost and perishability into concentric rings?
- How it worksWalk me through building the four rings outward from a single market town.
- Worked exampleShow me where a navigable river cuts through von Thunen's rings and stretches them along it.
- Going furtherWhat happens to the rings once refrigeration and trucking make perishability cheap?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't von Thunen's model wrong just because real farm regions never form neat rings?
Check yourself
End of topic.