Agriculture and livestock contribute in different ways to house-hold income. For some communities like Guadalupe Victoria theyare the main sources of income complemented by remittances. InVilla Hidalgo and Cerritos, however, remittances make the big-ger contribution and agriculture and livestock play a minor rolein household income. In all the communities studied, maize is themost important crop although sorghum and oats are also relevant.Maize is primarily cultivated under rain-fed conditions (Table 3).Wealthier farmers with large landholdings used mechanizedtillage and most of these farmers own their tractors. In rela-tively affluent communities like Cerritos, some farmers also havemechanical sowers and threshers. Nevertheless, farmers from thisregion do not tend to use herbicides or fertilizers and prefer to applymanure. This distinguishes farmers in the San Luis Potosi regionfrom those in the State of Mexico and Chiapas where farmers com-monly use fertilizers. Farmers in San Luis Potosi also prefer to usetraditional varieties of maize due to the risk of drought. Farmersharvest the grain by hand and maize is largely for home consump-tion.In good years farmers reported average maize grain yields of1.9 ton/ha – with substantial variations between rich communitieslike Cerritos with 2.5 ton/ha and poor localities like Guadalupe Vic-toria with 0.7 ton/ha. Our reported average maize yields for a goodyear is somewhat lower than Mexico’s national average for rain-fedmaize (2.2 tons/ha). Maize grain yields in bad years reportedly aver-aged 0.8 ton/ha. Maize cultivation is particularly precarious in SanLuis Potosi and crop failure is common. Farmers reportedly oftenonly harvest half of the sown maize area. This is in sharp contrastto the State of Mexico and Chiapas study regions where farmersharvest most of their maize area sown.The main livestock types are cattle, sheep and goats (Table 4).Two-thirds of households reportedly owned livestock with an aver-age herd of 1.1 cow equivalents per farm household. Cattle aremainly for dual purpose (meat and milk) and farmers maintain