Agriculture
Types of farming
Tell the types of farming in India apart.
Why farming matters. About two-thirds of India's people work in agriculture. It grows most of our food, gives raw material to industries (cotton for cloth mills, sugarcane for sugar mills), and some crops like tea, coffee and spices are exported. Farming in India runs from subsistence (growing food for your own family) to commercial (growing to sell).
Primitive subsistence farming ('slash and burn').
- A family clears a patch of forest by cutting and burning it.
- They grow cereals and other food for themselves, using simple tools (hoe, dao, digging sticks) and family or community labour.
- When the soil gets less fertile, they move and clear a fresh patch. The old patch is left so nature can make it fertile again.
No fertilisers or modern inputs are used, so output is low. It depends on the monsoon and the soil's natural fertility. Careful: this is shifting cultivation, not the burning of crop stubble after harvest.
Many names, one method. It is jhumming in Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland; Pamlou in Manipur; Dipa in Bastar (Chhattisgarh) and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Other names: Bewar or Dahiya (Madhya Pradesh), Podu or Penda (Andhra Pradesh), Kumari (Western Ghats), Kuruwa (Jharkhand). Abroad it is Milpa (Mexico), Roca (Brazil), Ladang (Indonesia), Ray (Vietnam).
Rinjha's story: Rinjha lives near Diphu in Assam. She watches her family clear and burn a patch of land. She loves the place, but next season her family will have to move, because the soil is getting tired.
Intensive subsistence farming. Found where many people share little land. Farmers put in lots of labour, plenty of fertilisers and other inputs, and irrigation, to squeeze the most out of small plots.
Why are the plots so small? The right of inheritance: a field is split between the children, then split again for the grandchildren. Draw it as a family tree and each generation's piece gets smaller. With no other way to earn, farmers still try to get the most out of it.
Commercial farming. Grown to sell, using lots of modern inputs: HYV (high-yielding variety) seeds, chemical fertilisers, pesticides and insecticides. The same crop can be both: rice is commercial in Punjab and Haryana, but a subsistence crop in Odisha, where families grow it mainly to eat.
Plantations: farming meets industry. One crop over a very large area, with big money (capital) and migrant workers. All the produce goes to an industry as raw material.
- Examples: tea in Assam and North Bengal, coffee in Karnataka, rubber, sugarcane, banana.
- Since everything is grown for the market, plantations need good roads and communication linking the estates, the processing factories and the markets.
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