15 Facts About Shifting cultivation

Shifting cultivation is an agricultural system in which plots of land are cultivated temporarily, then abandoned while post-disturbance fallow vegetation is allowed to freely grow while the cultivator moves on to another plot.

The period of Shifting cultivation is usually terminated when the soil shows signs of exhaustion or, more commonly, when the field is overrun by weeds.

Shifting cultivation is a form of agriculture or a cultivation system, in which, at any particular point in time, a minority of 'fields' are in cultivation and a majority are in various stages of natural re-growth.

Secondary forests created by shifting cultivation are commonly richer in plant and animal resources useful to humans than primary forests, even though they are much less bio-diverse.

Stable shifting cultivation systems are highly variable, closely adapted to micro-environments and are carefully managed by farmers during both the cropping and fallow stages.

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Shifting cultivation was still being practised as a viable and stable form of agriculture in many parts of Europe and east into Siberia at the end of the 19th century and in some places well into the 20th century.

Shifting cultivation was disappearing in this part of Finland because of a loss of agricultural labour to the industries of the towns.

Steensberg provides eye-witness descriptions of shifting cultivation being practised in Sweden in the 20th century, and in Estonia, Poland, the Caucasus, Serbia, Bosnia, Hungary, Switzerland, Austria and Germany in the 1930s to the 1950s.

Root question posed by these and the numerous other examples that could be cited of simple societies that have intensified their agricultural systems in association with increases in population and social complexity is not whether or how shifting cultivation was responsible for the extensive changes to landscapes and environments.

At first sight, the greatest stimulus to the intensification of a shifting cultivation system is a growth in population.

Shifting cultivation argues that almost all of the materials required by humans to live are obtained through social relations of production and that these relations proliferate and are modified in numerous ways.

Shifting cultivation's argues that given a choice, a human group will always choose the technique which has the lowest absolute labor cost rather than the highest yield.

Shifting cultivation was assessed by the FAO to be one of the causes of deforestation while logging was not.

Shifting cultivation was one of the first forms of agriculture practiced by humans and its survival into the modern world suggests that it is a flexible and highly adaptive means of production.

Nevertheless, shifting cultivation systems are particularly susceptible to rapid increases in population and to economic and social change in the larger world around them.