Shifting cultivators and farmers
Indigenous farmers developed many of the crops and methods that feed the world. You will learn how shifting cultivation works, why it is often misjudged, and what other farming systems peoples have built.
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Most indigenous and tribal people today are farmers. Their methods range from small forest clearings to stone terraces that climb whole mountains. Many of the world's main foods were first domesticated by indigenous farmers of the Americas, including maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, chillies and cacao. Others, such as rice, millets and yams, were developed by farmers in Asia and Africa.
Shifting cultivation
Shifting cultivation is farming by rotation of fields, not of crops. A patch of forest is cut and burnt, planted for a year or two, then left to regrow while the farmer moves to another patch. The technical word is swidden. It is practised in hilly, forested, high-rainfall regions where soils are thin and wash away quickly once cleared.
- Choose a plot. In north-east India this farming is called jhum. Land usually belongs to the village or clan. Elders decide which hillside is ready and each household is given a share.
- Cut the growth. In the dry months families cut the bush and smaller trees. The work is often done by groups who help each household in turn.
- Dry and burn. The dried cuttings are burnt just before the rains. Fire releases the nutrients held in the plants as ash. Firebreaks are cut to stop the burn spreading.
- Sow mixed crops. Seeds of many crops are sown together in the ash with a digging stick or hoe. A single jhum field may hold a dozen or more crops.
- Harvest in turn. Harvest is spread out. Maize and vegetables come first, rice or millet later, tubers last. Mixing crops spreads the risk if one fails.
- Leave fallow. Hill soil tires quickly, so after a short time the family moves to a new plot. The old one is not abandoned. It is resting.
- Forest regrows. Forest returns and restores the soil. The system works when the rest is long. When land is short and the fallow shrinks to a few years, yields fall.
- Jhum in north-east India and Bangladesh
- Podu in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, and bewar among the Baiga of central India
- Kaingin in the Philippines and ladang in Indonesia and Malaysia
- Milpa in Mexico and Central America, built around maize, beans and squash
- Chitemene among the Bemba of Zambia
Is it destructive?
Colonial foresters called the method 'slash and burn' and tried to ban it as wasteful. Later research has been kinder. Where there is enough land for a long rest period, the forest regrows, the soil recovers and a patchwork of fields and regrowth of different ages supports many species. Farmers also plant and protect useful trees in the fallow.
The system comes under strain when land is taken for plantations, reserves or settlers, or when the population grows. Then farmers have to return to a plot after only a few years, before the soil has recovered. Yields fall and erosion increases. The trouble lies in the squeeze on land, not in the method itself.
Permanent fields and terraces
Many peoples farm fixed fields with great skill. The Ifugao of the northern Philippines built rice terraces high into the Cordillera mountains, held by stone and mud walls and watered by channels from the forest above. They have been maintained for many centuries and are listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
Growing many crops together
A common thread is mixed planting. The Haudenosaunee and other peoples of North America grow maize, beans and squash together and call them the Three Sisters. The maize gives the beans a pole to climb. The beans add nitrogen to the soil. The broad squash leaves shade out weeds and keep the ground moist. Eaten together, the three make a balanced diet.
In the Andes, Quechua and Aymara farmers grow thousands of varieties of potato, planting many kinds in one field so that frost, drought or disease never destroys them all. They also freeze-dry potatoes in the cold mountain air to make chuño, which keeps for years. This diversity is a living seed bank on which plant breeders around the world depend.
- Fields rotate, forest regrows
- Ash and fallow restore the soil
- Hand tools, many crops in one plot
- Land held by village or clan
- Fields are permanent
- Water, silt and manure restore the soil
- Heavy work to build and repair walls
- Plots held by families
Land held in common
In most of these systems land belongs to a clan or village, and households have the right to use a share. A family owns its crop but cannot sell the hillside. Governments have often recorded such land as empty or as state forest, because no individual held a deed. Much of the conflict over tribal land begins with that misreading.
Today
Indigenous farmers now grow cash crops such as coffee, rubber, cardamom and broom grass beside their food crops, and many have shifted from swidden to orchards or terraces. Interest in their older crops is rising. Millets, long grown by tribal farmers in India and Africa, need little water and are being promoted again for dry regions. The United Nations named 2023 the International Year of Millets.