ABSTRACT
Having analyzed the influence of cropping labor input and labor input into conservation of equilibrium biomass in joint production, it becomes possible to focus more sharply on the manner in which production change takes place in African low-resource agriculture and the conditions under which labor use may be expanded without loss of productivity. In the crops of the semi-arid tropics zone village in Burkina Faso studied in detail by Prudencio, cropping labor per hectare, once the labor involved in conservation operations had been deducted, was rather noticeably similar across the different rings, or crop management systems, that his observations allowed him to distinguish. The tendency for African agricultural systems to exhibit several different degrees of intensity of production simultaneously leads to a logical inference from cross-sectional observation to variation through time. Prudencio's ring observations make possible a dynamic translation of a static picture of contiguous crop management systems to a process of moving from less "intensive" to more "intensive" systems.
