When I think of reasonably successful farmers, I normally assume that they'd be selling their farm goods at market. However, our host Ahmed was a subsistence farmer in the Egyptian middle class. The 4-5 acres he was cultivating was aimed at feeding his twenty-some person extended family household. As you'd expect, this involved any number of ingenious techniques for making a range of products. For example, on the right is more than a dozen loafs of sun bread. While they do have an oven, the climate gives them the ability to get a fair amount of their baking done by just leaving the dough out. The end product is fine, not the best bread you've ever tasted, but it could work well combined with a good dip. The ingenious part is the baking 'stones' which are a reprocessed version of a common material that merchants are happy to give away with a purchase: egg cartoons.
Avoiding the market involves using a fair number of hand made tools, some of which are passed down through the generations. For one example, see the grindstone the family uses. While the weight is fairly daunting, the end of the video shows that even a child could operate it once you overcome the static friction when it is at rest. From what Ahmed said, not every farm has such a tool, others from the village come by to use it. I suspect that there is some in-kind trading involved as various households allow others in the village to take advantage of their specialty tools.
Finally, those that read the last entry may be asking: so how did they afford new lights and a washing machine? The answer is that instead of selling food they use surplus labor to produce handcrafted furniture. The techniques involved in creating the wooden furniture were easily demonstrated but effective. Holes were bored with hand crafted tools and attachments made by exploiting the natural expansive properties of wood. The final pieces were great to sit on and quite attractive and I'm guessing could be sold at a much higher margin than agricultural goods. Obviously the family were good savers, reserving money for major purchases like an appliance or a trip to Mecca for Ahmed's mother. I think the key enabling factor is the small size and wide distribution of the farms, which I'll discuss in a future entry.
[Minor update: I've decided to mention Ahmed by name.]
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