The Environmental Origins of Shifting Cultivation: Climate, Soils, and Disease in the Nineteenth-Century US South Available to Purchase

Farmers and planters in the antebellum South held large tracts of unimproved land because they practiced shifting cultivation. Southern cultivators burned tracts of forest growth to quickly release nutrients into the soil. After five or six years, when the soil had been depleted, the old field was abandoned for as long as twenty years. Environmental factors such as poor soils, rugged topography, and livestock diseases accounted for the persistence of this practice, more so than slavery or the availability of western lands. Shifting cultivation slowly declined in the postbellum era, but southern farmers continued to improve a far smaller percentage of their land well into the twentieth century.