The 30% Principle: When Loss Is Part of the Design

By Josh Singleton | Founder, The Neighborhood Garden Project

Every gardener knows—some things are going to get eaten. Some seeds won’t make it. Some tomatoes will fall before they’re ready. And sometimes, you won’t even know what took them. That’s just part of it. And we’ve come to believe maybe God lets some of that happen so something deeper can grow in us.

A lot of gardeners, and farmers too, are taught to plant extra. Maybe 30% more than what they think they’ll need. It’s called building in margin—planning for what will be lost along the way. Commercial growers do it to protect their profit. If bugs or weather take 20%, they’ve still got enough to meet their goal.

But we don’t plant for profit. And we don’t measure by what’s left at the end. We plant out of faith. And we give like it all belongs to someone else. Every fruit, every herb, every root that comes out of the ground—it’s open-handed. We don’t track it. We don’t hoard it. We don’t worry about what gets taken. Because this isn’t about the harvest. This is about what’s happening in the people who come near.

That’s why we don’t build in 30% margin.

We build in 100%.

We assume that all of it—every bit—might be needed. Not just by us, but by whoever shows up hungry. Whoever stumbles into the garden on a hard day. Whoever needs to feel the generosity of God in something simple and real. The harvest is never our goal. It’s our overflow. And when you see the garden that way, you don’t panic when something’s missing. You just stay open.

Nature teaches this. A tree doesn’t drop one acorn—it drops thousands. A sunflower holds over a thousand seeds. That’s not waste. That’s wisdom. Healthy things give more than they need because that’s how the system stays alive.

We’ve built the garden project on that same truth. We don’t want to run tight. We want to run faithfully. We want our time, our energy, our space, even our budget to have 100% margin—enough that if someone needs to talk, we’re not rushing. Enough that if a door closes, we’re not scrambling. Enough that if a soul starts to bloom, we’ve got time to sit with them.

That’s how people grow. That’s how we grow.

When you lead or live with zero margin, everything becomes urgent. And when everything’s urgent, nothing gets rooted. But when you live with 100% margin, there’s room for trust. Room to breathe. Room to respond instead of react.

Even with money, it’s not about just raising what we need to survive. We ask for enough to leave room. Not for comfort, but for care. That’s what keeps us soft, responsive, and rooted in peace.

We don’t run this garden like a business. We don’t run it like a tight nonprofit. We walk it out like a parable. Every seed, every bug, every bite that wasn’t ours to harvest is still part of the story. We’ll keep planting more than we think we need. Because we know what we really need—peace, presence, and people—can’t be measured.

And that kind of abundance? It only flows when your hands are wide open.