Jhum cycle
Topic: Primary Activities: Gathering, Pastoralism, Agriculture and Mining · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 4 "Primary Activities"
Meaning
The jhum cycle is the fallow gap in shifting cultivation. Fallow means the land is left to rest. A farmer clears a forest patch by fire and grows crops for 3–5 years until the soil wears out. Then the farmer moves to a new patch and comes back to the old one only after this gap. As population grows, the gap keeps getting shorter. The soil cannot regain its fertility in time, and the land degrades. This is why NCERT says "the future of shifting cultivation is bleak".
Example
In the hill states of North-East India, such as Nagaland and Mizoram, jhum farmers once left patches to rest for many years. With more people needing land, they now return much sooner, and hill slopes lose soil and forest cover.
Don't confuse with
- Shifting cultivation (Jhuming): this is the whole farming system of slash, burn, crop and move. The jhum cycle is only the resting gap within it.
Related concepts
- Subsistence agriculture
- Names of shifting cultivation worldwide
- Intensive subsistence agriculture
- Wet paddy dominated intensive subsistence agriculture
- Intensive subsistence agriculture dominated by non-paddy crops
- Major rice exporters