Farmer management of fallow vegetation in S.E. Asia: options and implications to soil fertility
Biologal management of soil fertility by swidden cultivators is probably as old as agriculture itself. Despite the impressive heterogeneity of farmer practices, a unifying aspect that defines swiddening is the use of a fallow phase to rejuvenate soil properties through natural processes. Contemporary pressures for land use intensification, however, have stimulated farmers to innovate a wide spectrum of strategies to manage falow land more productively, collectively referred to in this paper as ‘Indigenous Fallow Management’ (IFM). Although there are definitional questions as to what actually constitutes a ‘fallow’, acceptable solutions that enable farmers to stabilize highly stressed swidden systems, improve their productivity, and thereby increase the human carrying capacity of S.E Asia’s uplands. Lengthy fallows that assured regeneration of secondary forest and adequate rehabilitation of soil properties have generally been relegated to a luxury of the past.
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Authors
Cairns, M.
Publication year
1997
