They have intensive home gardens to produce for the families' needs and the outlying farming is used mostly for cash crop production, where coffees and bananas are cultivated using intercropping methods.
The Enga of the Western Highlands Province in New Guinea receive most of their food from growing sweet potatoes Ipomoea batatas which they plant in mulch mounds at elevations up to 2,700 m or higher.
Peas, beans, and cabbage which are all highly tolerant to frost will be planted outside the circle of sweet potatoes and lower on the mound placing them closer to the cold temperatures of the ground.
[8] Another gardening strategy the Enga have implemented is the use of kin lands that are usually within one to two days walk from the farmers normal planting grounds.
[18] South America consists of modern-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Suriname, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile.
The environmental diversification of South America has been at the foundation of its presence in the global economy as a resource for agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting, livestock, mining and quarrying.
The Kayapớ lived in sedentary villages and were proficient in pottery and loom-weaving, yet they did not domesticate animals or poses knowledge on metallurgy.
These Tropical forest Tribes can be characterized through their farming, dugout canoes, woven baskets, loom weaving, and pole and thatch houses.
It is during this harvest season that the Kayapớ are able to exercise their leisure time before the cycle ends with (low water levels) and a return to intense fishing.
The second circle cultivated maize, manioc, and rice an area that needed various ash enrichment treatments and would experience short term growth.
The third zone was an area of rich soil and best served mixed crops including the banana, urucu, papaya.
The fourth zones consists of shade loving plants and are for a medical purpose, yet evidence of beans and yams have been also found here.
When the Kayapớ manage their agricultural plots they must work with a variety of interacting factors including the background soil fertility, the heterogeneous quality of ash and its distribution, crop nutrient requirements, cropping cycles, management requirements, and pest and disease control clearly illustrating the common misconception that this form of agriculture is primitive and ineffiecnet.
These Marginal tribes differed greatly from the other regions in that they were expert in making bark or plank canoes and domesticating dogs, hunting, fishing and gathering.
Nomads with simple socio-religious patterns, yet completely lacked the technology of pottery, loom-weaving, metallurgy and even agriculture.
The source of nutrition for the Chono, Yahgans, and Alcaaluf thus mainly consisted of sea food such as; whales, seal porpoises, guanacos, and otters.
Farming methods developed by Native Americans include terracing, irrigation, mound building, crop rotation and fertilization.
The Indigenous farmers stair-stepped the hills so that soil erosion was minimal and land surface was better suited for farming.
[30] Geographically native cultures in the Woodlands, Prairie, Plains, Great Basin, and Plateau regions of North America all utilized the Three Sisters to some extent.
[33] Chinampas, artificial islands constructed in swamplands and lakes, were invented by Mayan farmers and the technique became used extensively throughout Mesoamerica and was later used by the Aztecs as part of the land reclamation process of the city of Tenochtitlan.
[citation needed] Anderson breaks down common misconceptions surrounding the way in which Native Americans lived among nature and shows that their true impact was often one that attracted and invited others to the land they inhabited.
Native Americans, regardless of location, were privy to wildlife management such as, "coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, digging, thinning, and selective harvesting.
"[38] These practices were acted out in calculated intervals according to season and by witnessing the signals conveyed by nature to do so and, "on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries."
Anderson's writing focuses specifically on Natives established in California and emphasizes these techniques applied by them to be essential in maintaining, and even creating, the rich Californian landscapes settlers later happened upon, such as: the coastal prairies, valley grasslands, and oak savannas.
[39] Overall, the Native's practices were nature conserving and sustaining due to the specificity of their environmental knowledge which was learned through more than twelve-thousand years of trial and error.
Though he asserts that there is no real evidence of their destruction available, it is possible that the Indigenous peoples in California may have been responsible for the extinction of early regional species.
[41] When European and Asian farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs established themselves in that same land, the concept of their surroundings that they perpetuated was one of an uninhabited wilderness, untouched by man.
It is theorized by Anderson that without the Natives' calculated intervention, real wilderness in the form of thickets, dense understory, and wildfire would have deemed the land uninhabitable.
This constructed history has not only diminished Native ancestry and culture, but also the land, which is no longer maintained or protected by strategic resource management.
The European way of mitigating resource and land depletion follows a "hands off" model, which comes from the misconceptions of "leave no trace" mentioned previously.