Growing food for family-living purposes in connection with enough outside work to provide the family with the cash for the necessary farm and family expenses is a combination that many families now want to develop. Recent hard times and still more recent Governmental policies have renewed and intensified interest in this possible combination. This kind of farming has often been called subsistence farming and a farm of this kind a subsistence homestead.

Farmers and fisherman in the most remote areas of Northern Bangladesh in South Asia, on the shifting sandbar river island, known as Chars, such of the mighty Brahmaputra River. Chars are midstream islands formed through accretion of sedimentation of huge amounts of sand, silt and clay over time. They are in a constant state of transformation. In Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, land is scarce and the Chars are still used as areas for settlement and cultivation.