Is Gardening an Adaptive Strategy for Florida Family Farmers?

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Abstract
The climatic and economic situation of the last five years has been disastrous for many of Florida's full-time farmers. As a result, more and more full-time farmers are being forced to cut back or stop farming commercially and get a higher-paying off-farm job. For these part-time farmers it makes more economic sense to secure a stable income from off-farm work and guarantee more than half the family's food supply through gardening and livestock production, than take the risk of full-time farming. Although gardening is not often considered to be as important as commercial farming, the results presented here of a gardening survey in four Florida counties show that gardening today is a key survival strategy for Florida farmers. How it became an adaptive strategy is the theoretical point of this paper. We propose that originally survival strategies are processed by the individual as sets of decision rules, which can be modeled using hierarchical decision models (HDMs). Over time, the decisions are made so fre...

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