Now they restrict cattle to the 14-hectare hillside plot which they've had since 1979 - and from which they used to scrape a living of maize and beans before they invaded the valley-bottom land at La Colorada.

The people are farmers, planting corn (maize), beans, squash, and cucumbers in steep hillside plots.

Mr. Havell moved to Ossining in 1841 and bought a five-acre hillside plot with panoramic views of the Hudson River below.

Eventually, the Rudolphs returned to Nantahala, where many people grow their own food on hillside plots and the few jobs in the area are in sawmills, factories and faraway gas stations.

Central to the rise of the gens de couleur planter class was the growing importance of coffee, which thrived on the marginal hillside plots to which they were often relegated.

In 1989, the couple scraped together $2,000 for a hillside plot in Soshanguve.

But for the 2,000 Maroons in Accompong, a sleepy farming hamlet of single-story cinderblock homes and small wooden houses amid small hillside plots of bananas, coffee and ginger, this flinty pride has not come without steep costs.

His father was working on a new supermarket in Carlstadt when he found the hillside plot with a view across the Meadowlands to the skyline of the city he never liked living in.

Indeed, as if jumping to life off the new municipal flag, coca is everywhere in this Amazon boomtown: soft and leafy in backyard gardens and on hillside plots, or crackly and brown on black plastic drying sheets.

People subsisted on roots, berries and vegetables eked from hardscrabble hillside plots.