What is Intensive Subsistence Agriculture?

• Subsistence: Means farming strictly for 'Survival'. The massive farmer grows crops primarily to violently feed his own large family, not to sell in a massive global market for heavy profit.
• Intensive: Means applying massive, extreme, heavy pressure on a tiny piece of land to squeeze out the absolute maximum amount of food possible.

• Tiny Land Holdings: Because of the massive 'Right of Inheritance' laws in India, land is divided equally among sons over generations. Thus, farmers possess incredibly tiny, fragmented patches of land.
• High Labour Intensity: It is massively labor-intensive. Because the farmers are poor and the land is tiny, they do not use massive tractors. Instead, the entire massive family physically works in the mud using heavy hand tools.
• High Use of Chemicals: To violently force the tiny land to produce massive amounts of food, the farmer heavily dumps dangerous chemical fertilizers, strong pesticides, and heavy irrigation onto the soil.
• Multiple Cropping: The land is never left empty. The farmer grows rice in the massive monsoon, and immediately plants wheat in the winter on the exact same tiny soil.

This type of farming is completely unsustainable. Dumping massive chemicals on the exact same tiny piece of land year after year completely violently destroys the natural fertility of the massive soil, eventually turning it into dead rock.