There are several traditional methods of tilling. The simplest one, practiced on fertile, well drained soil, is the simple scratching of the surface with a cutlass, planting maize seeds and covering them at once with soil.
Tilling and planting are done at the same time. According to the slope of the land, the farmers often make mounds or ridges when tilling. These ridges, mounds or beds often contain grass and the remains of the previous crops as manure. Initially, ridges were made down the slope of a hill. In this way, work was easier for the women who worked moving uphill. Contour ridging means a much more uncomfortable working position, the more so the steeper the slope. The downward sloping ridges make erosion worse.
The correct timing of farm operations is part of good farm management. Timing is particularly important with respect to planting, weeding, and, for some crops, harvesting.
The right planting time is a matter of great concern in traditional agriculture. It is so important that certain ethnic communities in Africa follow a religious ritual in determining the right time for planting. After consulting an oracle, a dignitary, often a woman, sometimes the chief of the area, will anounce the start of the planting season.
In fact, since germination and healthy plant growth very much depend on the availability and distribution of rainfall, a good deal of familiarity with the local climate is needed in order to be able to choose the best time for planting. Research findings on planting times can again be drawn from the study "Traditional African Farming System in Eastern Nigeria":. There is statistical evidence that supports farmers' experience that late planting reduces the yield of their crops. The data suggest that farmers who planted their crops later than others suffered a worse labour bottleneck during planting time.
Lagemann, J. The effect of weeding on plant development also depends on good timing. In traditional agriculture, weeding may be done later than in modern agriculture, due to the effect of fire on weeds:. Although this result was obtained from a study on maize farming, similar results have been obtained for arable crops in general.
If weeding is carried out more than two months after planting, yields decrease in proportion to the length of the delay in weeding. The importance of good timing in traditional agriculture can be seen in the fact that mutual help is most prominent when the time factor is important.
The institutions of mutual help, e. Information about timing is summarized in the crop calendar. A crop calendar shows how farm work spreads throughout the year for each crop that is included. The crop calendar proposed here p. It is subdivided into two calendars, one for the lowland zone, and one for the highland zone. The crop calendar tends to show the "best" times for each activity. For easy comparison, all farm work has been grouped into four main operations: soil preparation, planting, farm maintenance, and harvesting Any teacher is free to break these operations down into their component parts.
For example, soil preparation in maize farming may consist of cutting down grass, burning, tilling, and ridging. Taking the example of maize, this is the information contained in the crop calendar of the rain forest zone:. It starts as early as the beginning of June and may end only by the end of July. Therefore, weeding is done earlier after planting than is the case with dry season maize crop. The crop calendars do not show a time for farm preparation for crops like beans, groundnuts, egusi and Irish potatoes.
This is because most of the time they are intercropped with major staple food crops such as maize and yams. Therefore their time of farm preparation is the same as for the main staple food crop they are combined with. For the annual crops, all the farming operations occur in a yearly cycle. For some staple foods - cassava, some varieties of yams, cocoyams and colocasia - this cycle is longer than one year but once it is finished, the whole sequence with all the operations will have to start afresh.
The cycle is different with tree crops. Farm preparation is done only once during the lifetime of a coffee, cocoa, or oil-palm tree. The plot will have to be prepared for transplanting the seedlings. Once the tree farm is established, the annual activities are farm care - weeding, pruning, mulching, application of fertilizer -, and harvesting. Processing of the harvest - drying, fermentation, de-pulping, oil making, safe storage, transportation and marketing - are much more important than for the annual crops but are not shown on the calendar.
The crop calendar can be useful in selecting crops for the school farm. When checking crops against term time and holiday periods, four questions must be answered:. If not, what can be done to ensure that these operations are done in time, especially during the summer holidays? If any such crops are grown, or if perennial food crops like pineapples are farmed, they should be farmed early enough for the class which planted them to harvest the whole crop.
Thus, pineapples should be farmed as soon as a class starts farming, cassava, cocoyams and cococasia should be farmed in class 5, so that at least by the end of class 6 the crop can be harvested. Annual food crops must be preferred since they limit farm planning to periods of one year.
The main planting season for plantains and bananas is the rainy season. Schools could also very well establish coffee, cocoa, and oil palm nurseries which could be prepared in February and started in March. The seedlings could be sold at transplanting time.
A simplified version of the crop calendar should be prepared for teaching in the lower classes. This may be done by concentrating on one crop only or on the two or three crops being grown on the same plot, e.
Simplification could also be achieved by concentrating on one activity, e. This would show the availability of various crops throughout the year. An example from Nigeria is provided in the figure below. Taking the appropriate crop calendar as a reference, the class can be asked to work out the calendar of farm operations for the crops to be farmed on the school farm.
Groups of children can be asked to find out from their mothers the locally agreed timing for the various farm operations. This can then be checked against the information provided by the general crop calendar.
As the year goes by, observations made on the school farm and on local farms will add precision to the first draft based on questions asked.
This is an exercise in further precision and might be useful in final year language teaching as well as in teaching on agriculture. In defining the different activities that make up farm preparation or farm care, one might refine the calendar for the crops selected. Price fluctuation for different foodstuffs could be studied in terms of harvesting periods. This can be done particularly well if from the crop calendar a calendar is derived which shows the availability of the main food crops throughout the year, and which adds the harvest times for the various fruits, and the main fishing and hunting season.
This leads to a complete picture of the nutritional situation. These are only a few suggestions. We shall depend on the creativity and resilience of the teachers to make full use of the possibilities which the crop calendar offers. Work connected with planting and sowing differs very much according to the crops grown. We shall therefore make a few general observations about planting in traditional farming.
Much of the detail will be left to the sections on particular crops. Each farming community has its set of rules in order to find out what will make the best planting material.
Pupils could be asked to find out from their mothers and fathers how they recognize suitable planting material and what signs they look for when they reject a plantain sucker or a groundnut seed for planting. There are also a number of techniques of safe storage and of preparation of seed material for planting.
One such technique is pre-germination maize and bean seeds, seed yams which advances plant growth after planting. These techniques should be described and discussed in school. Crops are always planted by digging a hole and burying the seed material in the soil. Unlike in earlier European farming, cereals are not broadcast but the individual seed grains are planted one by one.
Some crops are planted together at the same time under the method of mixed cropping. Thus, maize and bean seeds or groundnut seeds may even be mixed in the same container used for planting. There are never less than three maize seeds put in a stand, often more, and the same number of bean or groundnut seeds. If cocoyam or colocasia are interplanted with maize, this is done when the maize has already germinated and the plants are well established.
This has the advantage, among other things, that patches of ground can be used where the maize seeds failed to germinate. Planting is not done in straight lines, nor according to precisely measured distances. Since neither animal drawn implements nor engine-powered machines are used at any stage during farming, there is not really a need for straight lines. All that is required is that enough space is left for people to pass when they weed or harvest without damaging the crop. On a mound farmed with maize, beans, and leaf vegetables according to traditional methods, the average distance between stands was roughly 40 cm, with a standard deviation of This certainly does not represent a strict standard of planting distances.
But as can be seen from the table, most stands are between 25 cm and 55 cm apart from each other. On the mounds, crop density is high and amounts to 6 - 7 stands per square meter. Making allowance for the paths between the mounds that use up quite a lot of land, this would amount to about 45 stands with at least two plants each per hectare. The study from Eastern Nigeria reports crop densities of 22 to 31 stands per hectare on compound farms immediately surrounding the house, and between 12 and stands on farms away from the compound Lagemann, J.
On very fertile soil, the following densities were recorded, using the density square:. Crop density varies a lot according to soil fertility, the crops grown, and the amount of preparatory work a farmer is willing to do. Well prepared soil will support a higher crop density than poorly tilled soil. When ridges are formed, as is normally the case across the slopes of hills, more or less continuous contour lines are formed.
Ridges are of rather uniform width, depending on the work habits of the woman building them. Planting on ridges is often done in staggered rows. For example, up to three rows of maize and beans or groundnuts or cowpeas may be planted on a ridge.
Again, planting distances are not measured out by a yardstick, but they are not haphazard either. They follow rule-of-thumb knowledge about the best density on a given soil. If a school class went to measure the distances between stands of maize or cocoyams along one or two ridges planted according to traditional methods the children might be surprised by the degree of regularity they found.
The illustrations in this section show how one might represent graphically the planting patterns used on mounds in traditional farming. Similar patterns may be used for ridges. Weeding is a feature of nearly all farming. Exceptions are farms where crop associations are found which keep down most or all the weeds so that weeding becomes unnecessary. This is the case where pumpkins or various species of melons are grown as a secondary crop.
Weeding is usually done with a hoe. Weeds are left on the farm to wither - except those that could immediately start to grow again. As they decompose, they add nutrients to the top soil. If they are available in sufficient quantities they act as mulch, protecting the top soil against erosion and loss of water. Weeding is very demanding in terms of labour. If it is done too late there will be serious damage to crop yields see the section on timing of farm operations above.
The following is an example of the effect of late weeding on maize growth:. On a local farm with maize and cocoyams the farming woman and her helpers had started weeding from the boundaries of her farm towards the centre. They had given up, however, before finishing the job, probably because they lacked sufficient cocoyam cormels which they were planting as they went along.
Therefore, in the centre of the farm, weeds continued to grow for another two weeks. Subsequently, most of the maize plants in the central part of the farm were significantly shorter than the ones in the parts that had been weeded earlier. The measurements presented in the charts p. Farms are usually not manured. As was mentioned above, soil fertility is restored by. The cultivated areas directly surrounding the houses are manured with all sorts of suitable materials, e. Compost is hardly ever prepared.
The often-quoted study on traditional African farming systems reports the following methods of manuring the compound farm:. The yam mounds especially are covered with a thick layer of these materials;. It is usually applied to individual plants;.
The resulting rich soil is then applied to the crops;. After a period of one cropping season the latrines are filled in, and bananas or plantains are planted, and so receive ample nutrients for many years.
During this fallow period, the farmer cultivates another piece of land. Shifting cultivation is an agricultural system in which plots of land are cultivated temporarily, then abandoned and allowed to revert to their natural vegetation while the cultivator moves on to another plot. In some areas, cultivators use a practice of slash-and-burn as one element of their farming cycle. Advantages : This method helps to eliminate weeds, insects and other germs effecting the soil.
Shifting cultivation allows for farming in areas with dense vegetation, low soil nutrients content, uncontrollable pests. Disadvantages : In shifting cultivation , trees in the forests are cut. The fragmentation of natural habitat loss native species and invasion of more exotic weeds arise and burning down of sun-dried vegetation pollutes the air with carbon- monoxide, nitrous oxide and many other harmful gases are some of the consequences of shifting cultivation on environment.
The different forms of shifting cultivation described include slash-and-burn type of shifting cultivation , the chitemene system, the Hmong system, shifting cultivation cycle in the Orinoco floodplain, the slash-mulch system, and the plough-in-slash system.
The primary disadvantage of shifting cultivation , also called slash and burn or swidden agriculture , is the destruction of large areas of land, primarily crop fields and tracts of forest. When performed improperly, slash and burn can make once-fertile lands unable to support the new growth of crops and plants. For thousands of years, and continuing today, native peoples of the Amazon basin have practiced traditional shifting cultivation , which combines farming with forested habitats.
Shifting cultivation , sometimes called swidden or slash and burn, is commonly found throughout the Amazon and other tropical regions worldwide. Shifting cultivation is a form of agriculture which involves clearing of a plot of land by cutting of trees and burning them. The ashes are then mixed with the soil and crops are grown. After the land has lost its fertility, it is abandoned.
The farmers then move to a new place. Yes it is harmful for the environment because trees and leaves are burnt and their ash is added to the soil to increase fertility and after certain period of time the land gets abandoned and looses all its fertility and no crops can be grown on it.
So Shifting Cultivation is harmful for the environment. Shifting cultivation was banned in India because, as the trees were being cut down, it would lead to deforestation. It could also lead to forest fires as the trees were being burnt. Shifting cultivation though destructive is still practiced in many parts of the world because many people still poor. For millennia and still today, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin have practiced traditional itinerant cultivation, which combines agriculture and forest habitats.
In the Amazon and other tropical regions of the world, varied cultivation is common, sometimes referred to as slash and burn. Yes, it is polluting because the trees and leaves are burned and the ashes are added to the soil to increase its fertility and after a while the land is deserted and loses all fertility and there can no longer be cultivated.
Migrant cultivation is therefore harmful to the environment. In India, the cultivation of crops is prohibited because the felling of trees would lead to deforestation. Forest fires can also occur because trees have been burned.
Altered cultivation, even if destructive, is still practiced in many parts of the world because many people are still poor. They have no land on which to grow their crops. Welded farming, also known as moving farming, describes a gyroscopic farming method in which the soil is cleared for cultivation usually in the event of a fire and then allowed to regenerate after a few years.
Forestry officials tried to use forestry knowledge to stop or curtail cultivation on the move, putting the land under forest cover. To this end, they have implemented programs such as social forestry and the national tree planting substation program in Jhumland. The smartest answer!
Trees and shrubs in a wooded area are cut down and burned first. The crop is sown in the ashes. When this land loses its fertility, another plot is cleared and planted in the same way.
This is called walking cultivation. As soon as the land has lost its fertility, the land is abandoned and the farmer moves to a new land.
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