CDS (I) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 39 of 120

Correct — A, shifting cultivation. Both words are local names for the same practice on opposite sides of the world. Milpa is the maize-beans-squash field system of Mesoamerica, used especially in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, and it runs on a swidden cycle — roughly two years of cropping followed by about eight years of fallow while the forest grows back. Ladang is the Malay and Indonesian word for a dry, unirrigated field, the counterpart of the sawah or irrigated wet-rice paddy, and it names the slash-and-burn cultivation of Malaysia and Indonesia. Clear a patch, burn the felled vegetation so the ash returns potash to the soil, crop it for a year or three until yields fall, then abandon it and move on — that single description covers both.

• (b)mixed farming — Mixed farming means growing crops and rearing livestock on the same permanent holding, so that fodder and manure circulate between the two. It is a settled, capital-using system of Europe, North America and parts of India, not a forest-clearing one.
• (c)truck farming — Truck farming is the intensive growing of vegetables and fruit for a nearby urban market, named from the distance a truck could cover overnight. It depends on permanent land near a city, the opposite of moving on every few years.
• (d)plantation agriculture — The trap for anyone who recognises 'ladang' as Malaysian or Indonesian and jumps to oil palm and rubber. Plantations are permanent, commercial and capital-intensive single-crop estates — the region is right, the farming system is the exact opposite.

Shifting cultivation is the oldest surviving form of subsistence farming: a plot is cleared from forest, the slash is burned, crops are grown for one to three years until soil fertility falls, and the plot is abandoned to a long fallow while the cultivator moves to a fresh patch. It supports low population densities, gives low yields per hectare, and works only while the fallow is long enough for the forest to return. Almost every tropical region has its own name for it.

The efficient way to prepare for this family of questions is to learn the names as a single list rather than one at a time, because papers rotate through them. In India: jhum in the North-East, podu or penda in the Andhra-Odisha belt, bewar and dahiya in Madhya Pradesh, kumari in Kerala and the Western Ghats. Abroad: chena in Sri Lanka, ladang in Malaysia and Indonesia, ray in Vietnam, taungya in Myanmar, milpa in Mexico and Central America, roca in Brazil, conuco in Venezuela, masole in the Congo. One honest qualification about this question type: if an option had read 'subsistence agriculture', that would not be false either, since shifting cultivation is a kind of subsistence farming — the key takes the specific term over the general category, and here no such general option is offered, so the choice is clean.

• Milpa is a crop-growing system of Mesoamerica, especially the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, producing maize, beans and squash together.
• The milpa cycle runs about two years of cultivation followed by about eight years of fallow.
• In Malay and Indonesian, ladang means an unirrigated dry field used to grow crops — the counterpart of sawah, the irrigated wet-rice paddy.
• In slash-and-burn cultivation the ash of the burnt vegetation adds potash to the soil, which is what gives the first crop its yield.
• Other names for the same practice include jhum in North-East India, chena in Sri Lanka, roca in Brazil, taungya in Myanmar and masole in the Congo.

• Matching 'ladang' to Malaysia and then choosing plantation agriculture because of oil palm and rubber.
• Assuming milpa is a crop rather than a field system; it names the plot and the practice, not the plant.
• Treating shifting cultivation as identical to nomadic herding; the cultivator moves the field, the herder moves the animals.

Asked as a name-to-practice item, sometimes as a single pair like this and sometimes as a four-row match of local names to countries.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  'Chena' is the local name for shifting cultivation in

  • (a)Sri Lanka
  • (b)Brazil
  • (c)Indonesia
  • (d)Venezuela

  Answer(a) Sri Lanka — as roca is in Brazil, ladang in Indonesia and Malaysia, and conuco in Venezuela.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In slash-and-burn cultivation, the burning of the felled vegetation directly benefits the first crop mainly because it

  • (a)raises the soil temperature for germination
  • (b)adds potash and other nutrients to the soil as ash
  • (c)increases the water-holding capacity of the subsoil
  • (d)kills the deep roots of the forest trees

  Answer(b) adds potash and other nutrients to the soil as ash — which is also why yields fall once that store is used up and the plot is abandoned.