ABSTRACT
Traditional agriculture in Africa suffers from the image of being backward. A principal feature associated with backwardness of this sort is its "subsistence" orientation. African agriculture, it is supposed, produces barely enough for the needs of producers. The management of physical factors during the cropping season is generally more difficult in tropical agriculture than in the temperate zone. Routines derived from precise knowledge of the environment are needed for successful agriculture because alternatives as to use of factors of production are fewer than in environments where residual soil moisture is more easily controlled. Crop rotation based on fallowing is a system in which successive crops on the same piece of land, rather than following one another on an annual basis, are interspersed with several years of fallow in which the land reverts temporarily to bush or forest. The duration of the cropping phase in a fallowing system as a percentage of the total cycle is called the cultivation frequency.
