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 nomadsseasonal 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
dominant
1. 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 Asia
5. 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 laborintensive operation, done mostly by hand.
Intensive subsistence agriculture with wet rice not
dominant
1. Climate prevents wet rice production in portions
of Asia
2. 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)