Topic: Types of Subsistence Agriculture

Aim: How can we differentiate

between different types of

subsistence agriculture?

Shifting Cultivation: Characteristics

1.Practiced in humid, low latitude regions with poor soil Approx. 250 million people

2.Farmers clear land for planting by slashing vegetation and burning the debris (slash and burn agriculture)

3.Farmers grow crops on a cleared field for only a few years until nutrients are depleted and then leave it uncultivated (fallow) for many years so soil can recover

4.Extensive subsistence agriculture

Future of shifting cultivation:

1.Land devoted to shifting cultivation is declining

2.Being replaced by logging, cattle ranching, and cultivation of cash crops

3.Can support only a small population

4.Destruction of rain forests contributing to global warming

Soil fertility is maintained by rotating fields-note burned stumps with corn and beans interplanted.

Land cleared is called swidden

This shifting cultivation farmer in the Ixcan region of Guatemala is preparing a field for planting by slashing and burning the vegetation. The dense vegetation is chopped down, and the debris is burned in order to provide the soil with needed nutrients.

Pastoral Nomadism:

• Herding domesticated animals– Found primarily in arid and semiarid B-type climates

– Animals are seldom eaten• The size of the herd indicates power and prestige

– Type of animal depends on the region• For example, camels are favored in North Africa and Southwest Asia (also goats, sheep, and horses) Typical family needs 25-60 goats or sheep or 10-15 camels

– Transhumance practiced by some pastoral nomads- seasonal migration of livestock between mountains and lowland pastures

Above-Herding sheep in the Middle East

Right-Cattle crossing the Niger River

Qashqai people use modern roads to practice pastoral nomadism in the dry lands near Shiraz, Iran.

Intensive Subsistence Agriculture:

Intensive subsistence agriculture with wet rice dominant1. Wet rice: practice of planting rice on

dry land in a nursery and then moving the seedlings to a flooded field to promote growth

2. Dominant agriculture in Southeast China, East India, and much of Southeast Asia

3. Small percent of Asia’s agricultural land

4. Most important source of food in Asia5. Double cropping: obtaining two harvests

per year from one field

Wet rice terraces, Indonesia. Because wet rice needs to be grown on flat land, hillsides are terraced to increase the area of rice production.

Intensive subsistence agriculture. Rice is harvested by hand in the large population concentrations of Asia, including this field in Indonesia.

Rice is the most important crop in the large population concentrations of East, South, and Southeast Asia. Asian farmers grow more than 90 percent of the world's rice, and two countries–China and India–account for more than half of world production. Growing rice is a labor-intensive operation, done mostly by hand.

Intensive subsistence agriculture with wet rice not dominant1.Climate prevents wet rice

production in portions of Asia2.Agriculture in India and northeast

China is devoted to crops other than wet rice (e.g. wheat and barley)

3.Crop rotation: practice of rotating use of different fields from crop to crop each year to avoid exhausting the soil

4.Use of agricultural communes in China under Mao (now dismantled)