Abundance farming

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Abundance Farming is a farm organizing principle that prioritizes meeting the direct needs of the farmers first. Abundance farmers only turn to the market (typically a local market) to sell their abundance, or whatever is not needed for consumption by the farming family or community.

Similar to the traditional concept of Subsistence Farming, we prefer the term "Abundance farming" since it lacks the pejorative connotation of 'bare subsistence', or survival. Abundance Farming focuses on the positive aspect of creating abundance through direct enjoyment of the fruit of one's own labor and the retention of value on the farm.

Since the focus of this type of farming is a high degree of self-sufficiency in food production, it's naturally diversified, meshing easily with everything farming.

The antithesis of abundance farming is the ironic situation where agro-industrial farmers, such as those involved in large scale grain production are unable to eat their own products. Farmers like this may never eat from their own fields because they grow crops (like field corn and soy) that require additional processing, they lack the equipment or free time to process their own products and because they are so specialized that they do not produce a diverse-enough product base to subsist from. Often these farmers find themselves living in rural food deserts with limited access to fresh foods, and end up eating large amounts of highly processed, industrial food products.

Abundance farming employs the principle of retention of farm value and economies of scope in place of economies of scale.