Life in the slums can be very hard indeed. Not only is this devastating the worlds remaining tropical forests (see " keeping carbon in the trees " and " saving the rich diverse life of the rainforests ") while keeping the farmers in poverty, but it is also forcing many of them to abandon the land, and migrate to city slums in the hope of feeding their families. But even when it was possible to grow enough food reasonably easily with this system the farmers still remained relatively poor. Now the plots have to be reused too soon, with increasing loss of fertility. It was then possible to leave the plots fallow for 15 to 20 years which allowed considerable regrowth of the forest and good restoration of soil fertility. In earlier times when the population density was less, slash and burn worked reasonably well.
The Pod Farm plug-in is a free upgrade for users of the POD X3, POD. This too ensures the farmers remain poor. Pod Farm is also compatible with any of the Line 6 add-on amp and effects packages you may have purchased to work with GearBox. When the plots are far from the dwelling place cash crops cannot be guarded from thieves or wild animals, nor can the family help when there are young children. This is also valid if you have a POD Studio or Toneport.
Hillsides denuded by continuous slash and burn. Here I demonstrate how to use the footswitch jacks 1 and 2 on a Line 6 Toneport UX2 with POD Farm 2. Often they have to cultivate hillsides as all the land lower down is used up, and as they progress up and up they are likely to meet another farmer at the top who has similarly worked his way up from the other side.
The soil then loses its fertility and the farmer is faced with either a daily walk of several miles to a new patch or, increasingly as the number of landless farmers grows, they may have to uproot their families to move. Indeed quite often they clear a new plot every year. By slashing and then burning the forest, these farmers can usually sustain themselves for only 2 consecutive years on the same patch of soil. Maybe about 250 million farmers (they are not easy to count) are forced to eke out a living like that on these poor rainforest soils. Torrential tropical rains quickly wash nutrients out of the soil when it is left bare after harvest Can be received from Ancient Data Structures found on planets. When properly decrypted, will reveal the location of a Drop Pod containing Exosuit Upgrades. Encoded navigation data for input into a Signal Booster. Drop Pod Coordinate Data is a Constructed Technology and can be used on a Signal Booster to locate Drop Pods.
When this no longer happens in a cleared plot it soon becomes infertile. Drop Pod Coordinate Data is a Constructed Technology.
Thus continuous recycling keeps everything fertile and growing. As leaves fall or trees die everything is broken down by the soil’s organisms, nutrients are returned to the soil and the tree roots take them up again. The soil loses its fertility because the richness of the rainforest is in the trees. Slash and burn farming is a form of shifting agriculture where the natural vegetation is cut down and burned as a method of clearing the land for cultivation, and then, when the plot becomes infertile, the farmer moves to a new fresh plat and does the same again.