Geography Quiz: Types of Farming and Shifting Cultivation

Olericulture is the branch of horticulture that deals with vegetables, covering their production in the field, their storage, their processing and their marketing, and it is the branch on which market gardening and truck farming rest.

A plantation crop is a single cash crop grown on a large estate with heavy capital, hired labour and processing of the produce on or near the estate, and coffee, grown in the hills of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, is a classic example along with tea, rubber and sugarcane.

Milpa is the local name given to the slash-and-burn system of the Mexican and Central American forests, where maize, beans and squash are grown together on a burnt forest clearing for a few seasons.

Jhum, also written jhoom, is the local name of shifting cultivation in Assam and the hill states of the north-east, where a forest patch on a slope is cleared, burnt and cropped for two or three years before being left fallow.

The correct answer is B, Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, where the hill communities of the Eastern Ghats call shifting cultivation podu.

The correct answer is C, Indonesia and Malaysia, where the forest clearings of the equatorial islands are called ladang and are cropped with dry rice, maize and root crops for a few seasons.

Dry farming, also called dryland farming, is the practice of raising crops without irrigation in areas of low and uncertain rainfall, and the conventional limit used in Indian geography is an annual rainfall of about seventy-five centimetres.

Sericulture is the rearing of silkworms on mulberry or other host leaves for the production of raw silk, and it is an allied activity of farming that supports lakhs of rural households in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam and Jammu and Kashmir.

Where population is dense and holdings have been divided by inheritance over generations, as in India, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia, the farmer puts in abundant labour, manure and irrigation water on a tiny field and takes more than one crop a year.

The kolkhoz was the collective farm of the former Soviet Union, in which land, implements, livestock and labour were pooled and the farm worked under state direction with production targets fixed by the plan; the state farm, worked wholly by wage earners, was called the sovkhoz.

The Mediterranean climate, with its hot dry summer and mild wet winter, suits the vine better than almost any other region, and the lands around the Mediterranean sea, together with California, central Chile, the Cape region of South Africa and parts of southern Australia, are the world's great wine-producing areas…

In slash-and-burn farming the felled trees and undergrowth are dried and burnt on the spot, and the ash left behind is rich in potash and other mineral nutrients, which the cultivator depends on because no chemical fertiliser or farmyard manure is used.