subsistence farming -- what matters to us

People who hear us described as subsistence farmers sometimes ask us, "How much of your food do you buy?"

We're seldom sure what they mean. By volume? -- or nutritional value? or relative cost, as in, 'how much smaller is your food bill than someone else's'? In any case, whatever the metric, the answer is the same: Most of what we eat, we grow.

Moreover, most of what our animals eat, grows right here on the farm, as well -- we haven't traded a grocery bill for a feed bill.

What do we buy? Lots of things: coffee, tea, sugar, some flour, some spices and condiments, grains like wheat and rice, imported luxuries like avocadoes and chocolate. We buy tortilla chips (we make a lot of salsa and pico de gallo). Sometimes we buy ice cream. Sometimes we go out to a local Mexican restaurant. All of these things are de facto luxuries: if we deemed it desirable, we could do without them.

The goal isn't asceticism, and in any case our farm diet is the reverse of ascetic. And we don't live this way just to prove a point.

The goal is to take our own living -- as most of the created world must -- from the sunlight that falls on the land we live on, and to do so responsibly, so that those who come after us find the land to be in better heart because of our having lived here. Secondarily, we want to farm -- and eat -- in a way that cannot be disrupted by outside interruption.

Neither of these goals is possible if our farm is dependent on off-farm inputs.