Concepts

Subsistence Agriculture

Also Known As Subsistence farming

Citation Formats

General Reference

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. "Subsistence Agriculture." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/concepts/subsistence-agriculture.

APA Style

Agriculture and Farming Atlas. (n.d.). Subsistence Agriculture. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/concepts/subsistence-agriculture

BibTeX

@misc{agricultureandfarmingatlas-subsistence-agriculture,
  author = {Agriculture and Farming Atlas},
  title = {Subsistence Agriculture},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://agriculture.interactiveatlas.org/concepts/subsistence-agriculture},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Farming whose harvest is meant for the farmer's own family rather than for a market: smallholdings, most of the work done by hand or with animals, and the year's security riding on the year's weather. It remains how roughly two billion people in the rural developing world live, on holdings under two hectares, in forms ranging from shifting cultivation to the intensive small plots of monsoon Asia. Most of agricultural history is subsistence agriculture; the market farm is the newcomer.

Cross-Tradition Connections