Because no subsistence-farming peasants owned more than a couple animals apiece, early Christians pooled resources and developed a process of plowing that violently dragged a vertical knife and a moldboard through the mud using eight animals.
Although most Mexicans live in urban areas, Chiapas remains a largely rural state with a majority of residents living as subsistence farmers or peasant laborers.
This concentration of population was perpetuated during the colonial period by the commercial production of indigo and sugar on private estates, owned by a few wealthy families, alongside the continuing subsistence farming of peasants.
It is believed that improved agricultural technology adoption, such as using improved seed varieties, could inspire the changeover from the presently low productivity, peasant, and subsistence farming to commercial farming (which is able to produce surpluses).
To our knowledge, few authors have analytically examined the role that genetic diversity could play in weathering climatic change, and how the diversity of traditional varieties grown by the world's peasant and subsistence farmers will respond.
Sumerian peasants in the 30th century BC lived on the edge of subsistence; so did French peasants in the 18th century AD.
In a region of poor subsistence farmers, where many peasants speak little Chinese and few girls go far in school, the three sisters had been raised by farsighted parents to speak Mandarin, and they were full of spunk.
The peasants are practicing subsistence agriculture".
Trade negotiators for Central and South American countries, they said, should bargain for more gradual tariff reductions on corn, rice and beans -- the staples of subsistence farming -- to give peasants time to adjust to tough competition from large, highly efficient and heavily subsidized American farmers.
These small individual plots became devoted to the subsistence crops traditionally cultivated by peasants.
