Family Farms or "Corporate Agribusiness"?

Have you noticed that people who defend farming often use the expression “family farms” while people who attack farming prefer to talk about “corporate agribusiness”?

The first term suggests an image of an old fashioned way of life in some kind of small-scale rural paradise. The second term implies that farms are rapidly slipping into the hands of large, soulless corporations driven by Gordon Gekko’s mantra “Greed is Good.”

The truth about family farming lies in the middle, of course, and is much more complicated. In reality, the overwhelming majority of America’s 2 million farms are still owned and operated by families. The size of the farm has very little to do with a real definition of family farming. Some family farms are very small, while some families farm thousands of acres. Some family farmers do all the work themselves. Some employ large numbers of workers. More than half of all American farmers work off the farm, and of those, 80 percent have full-time jobs. Many family farms have incorporated. It’s a financial decision, not going over to the dark side.

There is no doubt that family farming is in danger from corporate mergers and acquisitions, from historically low prices, from residential development and sprawl, and other factors. A first step in understanding that danger is recognizing what a family farm is. What links together all family farms is a lot of hard work and a personal stake in both the financial and environmental health of the farm.