Land change management

This article deals with the spatial change of fields in fallow systems in agriculture. For the temporal change of types of use see change economy .

Exemplary cycles of a typical sedentary land shift economy over ten years

Field planted in land change cultivation in Mozambique. The vegetation was burned down above ground and after that only the hoe was used

With shifting cultivation or Landwechselbau certain to traditional forms of agriculture refer to operations where a periodic change of cultivated land takes place. The term is used differently:

1. In a broader sense, all long-term fallow systems are referred to as land change management. The English-language term shifting cultivation is mostly used in this manner and thus includes also the ( " semi-nomadic ") shifting cultivation , which is considered separately as a rule in German-speaking countries.
2. In the narrower sense, only the sedentary field cultivation forms - which (in the ideal case) are characterized by a permanent residence but fields that are used alternately - are referred to as land change cultivation. However, there are various forms of transition to shifting cultivation.

Due to the exhaustion of nutrients - so-called soil fatigue - all fields can only be used for a few years. As a result, you always have to switch to new fields. The abandoned fields can only be used again after decades.

Especially in tropical and subtropical regions of the sedentary form of this is land use still pure today subsistence-oriented and extensively operated; as " rain cultivation " in humid regions and as " dry cultivation " in semi-arid regions.

Forms of " crop rotation " (changing crops over the years) or "changing economy " (changing soil cultivation and other forms of use), which are mainly known from the history of Europe from the Neolithic Revolution to the early Middle Ages, are rare. In the High Middle Ages, the European land change systems were replaced by fixed land use systems such as three- field farming and single-field farming with pest management .

In the “ Third World ” today, sedentary land change construction is increasingly being supplemented by market orientation , so that these economic forms are classified as semi-intensive . This intensification is the cause of large-scale clearing , as it is associated with a change from Schwendbau ( clearing of the areas by fire without removing the original roots) to plowing (complete, deep removal of the original vegetation).

The largely sedentary country change economy is operated by over 260 million people worldwide.

literature

• Bernd Andreae : Allgemeine Agrargeographie , Berlin: Gruyter 1985. ISBN 978-3110100761

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Margarete Payer, Alois Payer (Ed.): Developing countries studies. Part I: Basic conditions. Chapter 6: Agricultural Operating Systems. HBI Stuttgart, 1998–1999, version of February 7, 2001 (course Introduction to Developing Countries Studies ; online at payer.de), Chap. 4.1.2.
2. ↑ rounded calculated from: Shifting culutivation completely according to Giardina et al. (2000) in Christoph Steiner: Slash and Char as Alternative to Slash and Burn: Soil Charcoal Amendments Maintain Soil Fertility and Establish a Carbon Sink. 1st edition, Cuvillier Verlag, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-86727-444-9 . Chapter 5.3 Introduction. online at Google Books minus shifting cultivation according to Dixon et al. (2001) in Cheryl Ann Palm, Stephen A. Vosti, Pedro A. Sanchez, Polly J. Ericksen: Slash-and-Burn Agriculture - the search for alternatives. Columbia University Press, New York 2005, ISBN 0-231-13450-9 . P. 8. pdf version