Modern-day homesteaders try to grow a lot of our own food, but we know we can always head to the grocery store if a crop fails.  Most members of traditional societies, though, would be faced with starvation if they didn't find ways to hedge their bets.  Diamond presented a slew of methods these traditional hunter-gatherers and farmers used to ensure they always had food to eat, and some of these techniques could be mimicked by modern homesteaders.

My favorite example came from the Peruvian Andes, where farmers scattered small garden plots across several miles.  Each farmer owned an average of 17 fields, each about 250 square feet in size, so the farmers were gardening a tenth of an acre spread across many tiny plots.  To modern farmers, this method seems very inefficient because the Peruvian farmers spent a lot of their time walking back and forth between these little plots.  However, even though the traditional farmers produced lower average yields than they would if they'd just made one big garden, the many plots in different areas evened out variations in yield due to weather.  As a result, farmers always managed to grow enough to survive and were never faced with starvation even during bad years.

A similar technique involves moving seasonally.  For example, farmers in the Alps gather together in the valleys for the winter then disperse across the mountaintops during the spring and summer.  On the homestead scale, I'd love to one day have an orchard on a ridge top that's more likely to miss late spring frosts.

Other methods that traditional societies use to deal with unpredictable food sources are less relevant to the modern homesteader.  We probably don't want to share all of our food with neighbors to even out the supply (especially because we can now just dry, freeze, or can excess for later).  Gorging ourselves in the summer so we can live off body fat during lean times probably won't go into fashion in America anytime soon, either.  But many homesteaders do use the traditional method of "storing" excess produce by feeding it to livestock, then eating the pigs or other animals in the fall or winter.

Yet another response to seasonal food shortages is to expand your diet.  When times are hard, people are willing to eat foods that aren't as tasty or that need special processing to leach out poisons (such as tannin-rich acorns).  Modern homesteaders take a step in this direction when they learn to love winter kale instead of craving hydroponic tomatoes during the cold season.

Stay tuned for more lessons we can learn from traditional societies in tomorrow's post.