Slash and burn agriculture is a widely used method of growing food in which wild or forested land is clear cut and any remaining vegetation burned. The resulting layer of ash provides the newly-cleared land with a nutrient-rich layer to help fertilize crops .
What are the advantages of slash and burn?
When done properly, slash and burn agriculture provides communities with a source of food and income . Slash and burn allows people to farm in places where it usually is not possible because of dense vegetation, soil infertility, low soil nutrient content, uncontrollable pests, or other reasons.
Does slash and burn reduce soil fertility?
The downed vegetation, or “slash”, is then left to dry, usually right before the rainiest part of the year. Then, the biomass is burned , resulting in a nutrient-rich layer of ash which makes the soil fertile, as well as temporarily eliminating weed and pest species.
Why is slash and burn bad for soil?
Slash and burn agriculture also results in significant soil erosion and accompanying landslides, water contamination, and/or dust clouds, as without trees and vegetation and their root systems, soil washes away during heavy rains and blows away during droughts.
Is slash and burn agriculture sustainable?
Slash-and-burn agroecosystems are important to rural poor and indigenous peoples in the developing world. Ecologically sound slash-and-burn agriculture is sustainable because it does not depend upon outside inputs based on fossil energy for fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation.
What is the slash-and-burn technique?
Slash-and-burn agriculture, method of cultivation in which forests are burned and cleared for planting . ... Traditionally, the area was left fallow and reverted to a secondary forest of bush. Cultivation would then shift to a new plot.
How long does slash-and-burn last?
By slashing and then burning the forest, these farmers can usually sustain themselves for only 2 consecutive years on the same patch of soil. Indeed quite often they clear a new plot every year.
What is the main disadvantage of slash-and-burn farming?
One of the disadvantages of using slash and burn agriculture is deforestation . When this type of agriculture is practiced by large populations, they have to cut down a lot of trees to grow new crops. This leads to an increase in carbon dioxide levels. Furthermore, these high levels of CO2 boost climate change effects.
What damage does kaingin create?
It can be caused of global warming . It can destroy the environment by burning the trees. The most common knowneffects are landslides, lower oxygen levels due to the destructionof trees and plants, and flashfloods. There are also studies beingconducted regarding the kaingin system being a cause of globalwarming.
Does burning fields help soil?
Soil fertility can increase after low intensity fires since fire chemically converts nutrients bound in dead plant tissues and the soil surface to more available forms or the fire indirectly increases mineralization rates through its impacts on soil microorganisms (Schoch and Binkley 1986).
How do you fix slash and burn agriculture?
Another option is to combine agriculture with animal husbandry . The waste from the animals can be used as fertilizer to sustain agriculture. The use of fertilizer both natural and artificial sources could replace the use of burning the trees to create fertile fields in the forest for agriculture.
What is another name for slash and burn agriculture?
The terms slash-and-burn, swidden, and shifting cultivation are often used interchangeably, although they outline different aspects of the system.
Is slash and burn good or bad?
Since the 1970s or so, swidden agriculture has been described as both a bad practice , resulting in the progressive destruction of natural forests, and an excellent practice, as a refined method of forest preservation and guardianship.
What are the main features of slash and burn agriculture?
(i) Forests are cleared and trees are burnt to make the land available for cultivation . (ii) Digging stick is mainly used for cultivation. (iii) Mainly root crops and food crops are grown for their own use.
In which country slash and burn is called Humah?
The place to start addressing slash and burn — what the Indonesian government has called “a crime against humanity” — is the legal status of small-scale farming communities. Seventy-five percent of Indonesia’s 472 million acres of land is classified as State Forest Land.
What is kaingin system?
: employing a technique of clearing land by slashing and burning underbrush and trees and plowing the ashes under for fertilizer well-known kaingin system which has been enormously destructive of valuable timber— A. L. Kroeber.
