A family farm is generally understood to be a farm owned and/or operated by a family. It is sometimes considered to be an estate passed down by inheritance.
Although a recurring conceptual and archetypal distinction is that of a family farm as a smallholding versus corporate farming as large-scale agribusiness, that notion does not accurately describe the realities of farm ownership in many countries. Family farm businesses can take many forms, from smallholder farms to larger farms operated under intensive farming practices. In various countries, most farm families have structured their farm businesses as corporations (such as limited liability companies) or trusts, for liability, tax, and business purposes. Thus, the idea of a family farm as a unitary concept or definition does not easily translate across languages, cultures, or centuries, as there are substantial differences in agricultural traditions and histories between countries and between centuries within a country. For example, in U.S. agriculture, a family farm can be of any size, as long as the ownership is held within a family. A 2014 USDA report shows that family farms operate 90 percent of the nation's farmland, and account for 85 percent of the country's agricultural production value. However, that does not at all imply that corporate farming is a small presence in U.S. agriculture; rather, it simply reflects the fact that many corporations are closely held. In contrast, in Brazilian agriculture, the official definition of a family farm (agricultura familiar) is limited to small farms worked primarily by members of a single family;Farms are those that employ mostly family members, with a maximum of five additional temporary workers. but again, this fact does not imply that corporate farming is a small presence in Brazilian agriculture; rather, it simply reflects the fact that large farms with many workers cannot be legally classified under the family farm label because that label is legally reserved for smallholdings in that country.
Farms that would not be considered family farms would be those operated as collectives, non-family corporations, or in other institutionalised forms. At least 500 million of the world's [estimated] 570 million farms are managed by families, making family farms predominant in global agriculture.Lowder, S. K., J. Skoet and S. Singh. 2014. What do we really know about the number and distribution of farms and family farms worldwide? http://www.fao.org/docrep/019/i3729e/i3729e.pdf
Definitions An "informal discussion of the concepts and definitions" in a working paper published by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 2014 reviewed English, Spanish and French definitions of the concept of "family farm". Definitions referred to one or more of labor, management, size, provision of family livelihood, residence, family ties and generational aspects, community and social networks, subsistence orientation, patrimony, land ownership and family investment.Garner, E. and A. P. de la O Campos. 2014. Identifying the "family farm" – An informal discussion of the concepts and definitions. ESA Working Paper 14-10. FAO, Rome. http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4306e.pdf The disparity of definitions reflects national and geographical differences in cultures, rural land tenure, and rural economies, as well as the different purposes for which definitions are coined.
The 2012 United States Census of Agriculture defines a family farm as "any farm where the majority of the business is owned by the operator and individuals related to the operator, including relatives who do not live in the operator’s household"; it defines a farm as "any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during a given year."United States Department of Agriculture. 2015. 2012 Census of Agriculture. Farm typology. Vol. 2. Subject series. Part 10. AC-12-S-10.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations defines a "family farm" as one that relies primarily on family members for labour and management.
In some usages, "family farm" implies that the farm remains within the ownership of a family over a number of generations.Bjørhaug, H. and A. Blekesaune. 2008. Gender and work in Norwegian family farms. Sociologia ruralis 48: 152–65.
Being special-purpose definitions, the definitions found in laws or regulations may differ substantially from commonly understood meanings of "family farm". For example, In the United States, under federal Farm Ownership loan regulations, the definition of a "family farm" does not specify the nature of farm ownership, and management of the farm is either by the borrower, or by members operating the farm when a loan is made to a corporation, co-operative or other entity. The complete definition can be found in the US Code of Federal Regulations 7 CFR 1943.4.
History
In the Roman Republic, latifundia, great landed estates, specialised in agriculture destined for export, producing grain, olive oil, or wine, corresponding largely to modern industrialized agriculture but depending on slave labour instead of mechanization, developed after the Second Punic War and increasingly replaced the former system of family-owned small or intermediate farms in the Roman Empire period. The basis of the latifundia in Spain and Sicily was the ager publicus that fell to the dispensation of the state through Rome's policy of war in the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD.
In the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the largely self-sufficient villa-system of the latifundia remained among the few political-cultural centres of a fragmented Europe. These latifundia had been of great importance economically, until the long-distance shipping of wine and oil, grain and garum disintegrated, but extensive lands controlled in a single pair of hands still constituted power: it can be argued that the latifundia formed part of the economic basis of the European social feudal system, taking the form of Manorialism, the essential element of feudal society,"Feudal Society", in its modern sense was coined in Marc Bloch's 1939–40 books of the same name. Bloch (Feudal Society, tr. L.A. Masnyon, 1965, vol. II, p. 442) emphasised the distinction between economic manorialism which preceded feudalism and survived it, and political and social feudalism, or seigneurialism. and the organizing principle of rural economy in medieval Europe. Manorialism was characterised by the vesting of legal and economic power in a Lord of the manor, supported economically from his own direct landholding in a manor (sometimes called a fief), and from the obligatory contributions of a legally subject part of the peasant population under the jurisdiction of himself and his manorial court. Manorialism died slowly and piecemeal, along with its most vivid feature in the landscape, the open field system. It outlasted serfdom as it outlasted feudalism: "primarily an economic organization, it could maintain a warrior, but it could equally well maintain a capitalist landlord. It could be self-sufficient, yield produce for the market, or it could yield a money rent." a comment on The last feudal dues in France were abolished at the French Revolution. In parts of eastern Germany, the Rittergut manors of Junkers remained until World War II. The common law of the leasehold estate relation evolved in medieval England. That law still retains many archaic terms and principles pertinent to a feudal social order. Under the tenant system, a farm may be worked by the same family over many generations, but what is inherited is not the farm's estate itself but the lease on the estate. In much of Europe, serfdom was abolished only in the modern period, in Western Europe after the French Revolution, in Russia as late as in 1861.
In contrast to the Roman system of latifundia and the derived system of manoralism, the Germanic peoples had a system based on heritable estates owned by individual families or clans. The Germanic term for "heritable estate, allodium" was *ōþalan (Old English ēþel), which incidentally was also used as a rune name; the gnomic verse on this term in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem reads:
"[An estate] is very dear to every man, if he can enjoy there in his house whatever is right and proper in constant prosperity."
In the inheritance system known as Salic patrimony (also gavelkind in its exceptional survival in medieval Kent) refers to this clan-based possession of real estate property, particularly in Germanic context. Terra salica could not be sold or otherwise disposed; it was not alienable. Much of Germanic Europe has a history of overlap or conflict between the feudal system of manoralism, where the estate is owned by noblemen and leased to the tenants or worked by serfs, and the Germanic system of free farmers working landed estates heritable within their clan or family. Historical prevalence of the Germanic system of independent estates or Höfe resulted in dispersed settlement (Streusiedlung) structure, as opposed to the village-centered settlements of manoralism.
In German-speaking Europe, a farmyard is known as a ; in modern German this word designates the area enclosed by the farm buildings, not the fields around them, and it is also used in other everyday situations for courtyards of any type ( = 'back yard', etc.). The recharacterized compound Bauernhof was formed in the early modern period to designate family farming estates and today is the most common word for 'farm', while the archaic Meierhof designated a manorial estate. Historically, the unmarked term Hof was increasingly used for the royal or noble court.Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch (1774). The estate as a whole is referred to by the collective Gehöft (15th century); the corresponding Slavic concept being Khutor. Höfeordnung is the German legal term for the inheritance laws regarding family farms, deriving from inheritance under medieval Saxon law. In England, the title of yeoman was applied to such land-owning commoners from the 15th century.
In the early modern and modern period, the dissolution of manoralism went parallel to the development of intensive farming parallel to the Industrial Revolution. Mechanization enabled the cultivation of much larger areas than what was typical for the traditional estates aimed at subsistence farming, resulting in the emergence of a smaller number of large farms, with the displaced population partly contributing to the new class of industrial wage-labourers and partly emigrating to the New World or the Russian Empire (following the 1861 emancipation of the serfs). The family farms established in Imperial Russia were again collectivized under the Soviet Union, but the emigration of European farmers displaced by the Industrial Revolution contributed to the emergence of a system of family estates in the Americas (Homestead Act of 1862).
Thomas Jefferson's argument that a large number of family estates are a factor in ensuring the stability of democracy was repeatedly used in support of subsidies.
Developed world
Perceptions of the family farm