This chapter examines the effect of interannual variability on small-scale agricultural systems, and the use of wild resources to stabilise fluctuations in agricultural productivity. Societies based on small-scale agriculture are frequently vulnerable to severe fluctuations in food availability. For such systems to approximate self-sufficiency, it is crucial that other, highly productive food resources be available, whose structure of interannual variability is largely independent of that governing agriculture. In the Old World, this problem is neatly solved by the coupling of agriculture with animal husbandry. In the New World, where this was not an option, a similar result was achieved by the hunting of large mammals or the harvesting of anadromous fish. Two ethnographic examples of this strategy from North America are briefly examined: the hunting–farming pattern of the Pawnee in the Central Plains region, and the fishing–farming complex of the Huron of the Upper Great Lakes region. It is concluded that the coupling of highly productive wild resources with simple agriculture represents a common coping strategy in cases where large domestic animals are not available, particularly in agriculturally marginal environments. Such buffering mechanisms vary considerably in their organisation, however, ranging from multi-community or multi-ethnic systems with local subsistence specialisation and regularly functioning exchange networks, to very generalised subsistence strategies, in which the members of a given group may divide or switch their efforts from one subsistence pursuit to another, depending on current local conditions.