中祖谷の農業
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概要
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It is an important problem of agricultural geography in Japan to study the mountain agriculture in this country having few plains. The writer, studying the Mountain agriculture at Naka-Iya, has found several interesting phenomena as follows:1) All of the settelments and cultivated lands are located on steep slopes almost 20-40°, see Tab. 1). One can get there on foot only by some mountain passes higher than 1, 000m above sea level. Accordingly, it costs a great deal to transport every goods to and from the outside.2) The productive power of land is very low, owing to climatic conditions together with the inferior fretility of soils resulting from severe soil erosion.3) The technical backwardness of agriculture aggravates the lowness of the natural productive power; e. g. the lack of attention to warming the irrigation-water, no pretention against soil erosion, use of indigenous species of crop, etc.4) The population is too great for the cultivated area on the one hand, and its location prohibits the people to engage in any other occupation than agriculture on the other, accordingly the scale of agriculture is very small. It seems to me that the people have been able to maintain the largest crop yield, conquering the technical inferiority and the low natural potentialities only by the most intensive labour.5) Most of the cultivated lands are normal fields and yakihata (burning cultivation field) called kona, paddy-fields being very few. Barley, wheat, tobacco, sweet potato and mitsumata (from the bark of which Japanese paper is made) are the staple products there.6) Cheap in transportation cost relatively to its weight, tobacco has been the most important cash crop since about four hundred years ago. It was grown on the more than half of the normal fields by all farmers. But in and after the wartime, its area was reduced to the present acrage of tobacco which is less than a quarter of the prosperous time (Fig.2). Sweet potato has been taking the place of it on account of the bad conditions of food supply, changes of their prices and the large new demands of labour (lumbering and constructing of dam).7) Natural grasses, useful as the roof material, fertilzer, and fodder, are so abundant that it is quite free for every one to mow the grass over “Iriaichi” (communal grassland).8) There remains a custom of labour rent (the old tenancy system whose farm rent is paid by labour) a kind of serf-system.
- 人文地理学会の論文