All of the different phenomena discussed above, from the soil nutrients to the urban migration, are all interrelated. We can now start to see slash & burn agriculture as a human-environment system. ![]() Often these people will migrate to cities, moving into slums and seeking whatever work they can find to get by. Some of these people may seek alternative employment within the area, and others will migrate. With his signature black curls pulled back in a low ponytail and the absence of his trademark top hat and sunglasses, we wouldnt have guessed it was Slash in a million years. Finally, it can force people out of the farming business. Photographers snapped photos of the 47-year-old, whose real name is Saul Hudson, after he hit the pool in Ibiza wearing plaid swim trunks. It can also put farmers and their dependents into poverty, as they lack access to adequate land to grow the food that they depend on. This can contribute to major deforestation across broad regions. As a result, more and more land is cleared. ![]() It means that a given section of land does not have enough time to regrows fully before a farmer needs it again. This happens when there is a lot of population growth in an area. In practice today, there very often is not enough land per farmer. As long as there is enough land per farmer, this form of slash & burn agriculture is sustainable. Each section within that area would go through the same slash/burn/farm/regrows process at staggered intervals. Thus, it is possible for a slash & burn farmer to within a fixed area of land indefinitely. However, after an area has been left alone for enough time, it will gradually regrows sufficiently that it can be reused for slash and burn agriculture. This can result in vast areas of land being taken up, as farmers go from one area to the next. In practice, this last option – slashing and burning more land – is often what happens. Finally, the farmers can relocate to new land, repeating the slash and burn process. But this can impoverish the farmers and their dependents as yields become too low. The farmers could simply continue to grow their crops on the land, even while yields decline. (For example, grain crops like wheat and maize take nitrogen from the soil, whereas legume crops like beans and peanuts put nitrogen into the soil.) However, this constrains what the farmers are able to grow, and may still be insufficient to sustain high yields. They might be able to rotate crops, if different crops will remove different nutrients from the soil and also put other nutrients back into the soil. They might be able to acquire fertilizers to replenish the nutrients in the soil, but this can be expensive, and not everyone has access to fertilizers. ![]() Farmers on this land then face some difficult choices. The crops in the first growing season have full access to all of the nutrients, but the crops in subsequent growing seasons only have access to whatever nutrients are left over from previous growing seasons. As the crops grow, they uptake the nutrients that were placed into the soil by the burning. The catch with slash and burn agriculture is that the fertilization from the burning has only a temporary effect.
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