Milpa

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In agriculture, a milpa is a field for growing food crops and a crop-growing system used throughout Mesoamerica, especially in the Yucatán Peninsula, in Mexico. The word milpa derives from the Nahuatl words milli and pan. Based on the agronomy of the Maya and of other Mesoamerican peoples, the milpa system is used to produce crops of maize, beans, and squash primarily. The land-conservation cycle of the milpa is two years of cultivation and eight years of laying fallow. In the Mexican states of Jalisco and Michoacán and in central Mexico as well as Guanacaste Province Costa Rica, as an agricultural term milpa denotes a single corn plant; in El Salvador and Guatemala, milpa specifically refers to harvested crop of maize and the field for cultivation. A milpa is a field, usually but not always recently cleared, in which farmers plant a dozen crops at once including maize, avocados, multiple varieties of squash and bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jícama, amaranth, and mucuna...

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