Shifting cultivation is the dominant farming system in the northern mountainous regions of Laos resulting to the vagaries of climate, soils and steep slopes. The most pressing problem facing farmers in these areas is declining rice yields, largely due to declining soil fertility and increasing weed problems. In the recent past, farmers were able to overcome occasional disasters in their rice crops by gathering forest products and hunting wild animals for home consumption and sale. These mechanisms have, however, rapidly diminished in the last 20 years, resulting in newly emerging poverty. To cope with this increasingly vulnerable farming system, many strategies are emerging depending on local and household opportunities. Some are robust strategies and are likely to persist, such as diversifying farm activities to reduce reliance on upland rice and concentrating labour and manure on the smaller areas of more fertile fields. Other strategies are short term coping mechanisms that have developed in the absence of better alternatives, such as selling labour and growing cash crops in the hope that traders will come to buy them. But, the most widespread strategy, which is becoming increasingly important, is to raise animals.