Growing for Subsistence vs Growing for Market
Why growing to feed your family first is the resilient choice — not the backward one.
One of the SAHRC commissioners asked me a question I wasn’t expecting: “Do you teach food preservation? Isn’t the reason people sell crops because they have excess?” It was a good question. I realised afterwards they were really asking something deeper: how does a small farm make money when it’s primarily growing to feed itself?
Growing for market and growing for subsistence are fundamentally different activities, but most agricultural policy has them the wrong way around. In my experience, the goal always seems to be income — despite the fact that farm income can be very unpredictable, and not always within farmers’ control.
What happens when you grow for market first
When you grow for market first, you make planting decisions based on what sells at the highest price. If you think you have access to a middle-class market, you grow lettuce — perishable, high-value, popular. But if that lettuce doesn’t sell this week (bad weather, your market contact falls through, the procurement officer changes) you have neither money nor staples. You used your limited garden space on a gamble, and you lost.
Zoom out, and you see the same pattern across Africa, where subsistence agriculture has been eroded by cash crops like coffee and chocolate, at the expense of traditional staples, often without commensurate improvement in people’s daily lives. Government procurement schemes can make this worse, not better: if a policy rewards cabbages, you plant a whole field of cabbages to hit the target — then the harvest lands all at once, floods the tiny local market, and again you’re left with neither money nor food.
What happens when you grow for subsistence first
When you grow for subsistence first, you focus on meeting your family’s needs across the whole year. You grow nutritious staples suited to our climate, planted in succession so something is always ready. Growing without pesticides, herbicides or inorganic fertilizers comes naturally, because your planting is so diversified. You plan for 30–40% more than you need, because weather, pests and the general chaos of farming will take their share. And then, when your systems are working and your soil is healthy, something cool happens: you consistently have extra.
That extra isn’t necessarily high-value or high-profit. It’s beetroot, eggs, greens. But you sell it directly to your neighbours, who tell you what they’d love you to grow next season, and you begin to build a relationship with your customers. Even when you give the excess away rather than selling it, you gain — because any improvement in your neighbourhood’s wellbeing directly improves your own.
Why subsistence-first produces better market access
Counter-intuitively, subsistence-first farming produces better market access than market-first farming:
Consistent supply. Because subsistence requires consistent planting, it creates consistent supply.
Smoother income. Because it’s diversified, it smooths out the peaks and troughs that destroy monocrop income.
Better prices. Because it sells directly and locally, it captures two to three times the price per kilogram compared to wholesale.
Rethinking smallholder policy
The challenge is that most smallholder policy frames the farmer as a market gardener first and a household provider second. It asks, “What can you sell?” when it should ask, “What does your family need — and what will naturally flow from that abundance into your community?”
And preservation? Yes, we teach it — kimchi, cheese, pesto, drying, tomato passata. But if your planting is diverse and well-sequenced, preservation is something you do occasionally, not desperately. The goal is a variety of food almost year-round, not to grow one thing very well and hope the market is there.
This is part of what we brought to the SAHRC Food Inquiry, and it connects to a bigger question about who gets to grow: is permaculture just for rich people?
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