Subsistence farming in the context of "East Region (Cameroon)"

A smallholding or smallholder is a small farm operating under a small-scale agriculture model. Definitions vary widely for what constitutes a smallholder or small-scale farm, including factors such as size, food production technique or technology, involvement of family in labor and economic impact. There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farms in developing countries of the world alone, supporting almost two billion people. Smallholdings are usually farms supporting a single family with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming. As a country becomes more affluent, smallholdings may not be self-sufficient. Still, they may be valued for providing supplemental sustenance, recreation, and general rural lifestyle appreciation (often as hobby farms). As the sustainable food and local food movements grow in affluent countries, some of these smallholdings are gaining increased economic viability in the developed world as well.

Small-scale agriculture is often in tension with industrial agriculture, which finds efficiencies by increasing outputs, monoculture, consolidating land under big agricultural operations, and economies of scale. Certain labor-intensive cash crops, such as cocoa production in Ghana or Côte d'Ivoire, rely heavily on smallholders; globally, as of 2008, 90% of cocoa is grown by smallholders. These farmers rely on cocoa for up to 60 to 90 per cent of their income. Similar trends in supply chains exist in other crops like coffee, palm oil, and bananas. In other markets, small scale agriculture can increase food system investment in small holders improving food security. Today, some companies attempt to include smallholdings into their value chain, providing seeds, feed, or fertilizers to improve production.

Soil conservation is the prevention of loss of the topmost layer of the soil from erosion or prevention of reduced fertility caused by over usage, acidification, salinization or other chemical soil contamination.

Slash-and-burn and other unsustainable methods of subsistence farming are practiced in some lesser developed areas. A consequence of deforestation is typically large-scale erosion, loss of soil nutrients and sometimes total desertification. Techniques for improved soil conservation include crop rotation, cover crops, conservation tillage and planted windbreaks, affect both erosion and fertility. When plants die, they decay and become part of the soil. Code 330 defines standard methods recommended by the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service. Farmers have practiced soil conservation for millennia. In Europe, policies such as the Common Agricultural Policy are targeting the application of best management practices such as reduced tillage, winter cover crops, plant residues and grass margins in order to better address soil conservation. Political and economic action is further required to solve the erosion problem. A simple governance hurdle concerns how we value the land and this can be changed by cultural adaptation. Soil carbon is a carbon sink, playing a role in climate change mitigation.

Personal life is the course or state of an individual's life, especially when viewed as the sum of personal choices contributing to one's personal identity.

Apart from hunter-gatherers, most pre-modern peoples' time was limited by the need to meet necessities such as food and shelter through subsistence farming; leisure time was scarce.People identified with their social role in their community and engaged in activities based on necessity rather than on personal choice. Privacy in such communities was rare.

Alluvium (from Latin alluvius, from alluere 'to wash against') is loose clay, silt, sand, or gravel that has been deposited by running water in a stream bed, on a floodplain, in an alluvial fan or beach, or in similar settings. Alluvium is also sometimes called alluvial deposit. Alluvium is typically geologically young and is not consolidated into solid rock. Sediments deposited underwater, in seas, estuaries, lakes, or ponds, are not described as alluvium.Floodplain alluvium can be highly fertile, and supported some of the earliest human civilizations.