Looking historically and moving into the present, the way farms are measured, valued and compared has significance on how farm policy is developed and applied. What is measured, and what goes unmeasured can have consequences on the types of farms that agricultural policy helps to prosper and those that may not benefit to the same degree from policy changes. One common mode of measuring farms is by gross annual farm receipts. Another important but less commonly used is by farm acreage. Overall, average farm acreage has been increasing, while the overall number of farms, in Canada and the U.S., has been decreasing. The average age of farm operators has also been increasing.155 However, while these measures indicate important changes in agriculture over time, measuring size only, especially by either of the two measures above, does not capture all that is important about the differences between different types of farms. Of particular importance in North America has been how to measure and define the importance of what are commonly called family farms.
155 Statistics Canada, “Snapshot of Canadian Agriculture: Chapter 1,” in 2011 Farm and Farm Operator Data, Census of Agriculture 2011, Statistics Canada (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/95-640-x/2012002/01-eng.htm#II), accessed April 30, 2014; Linda Lobao and Katherine Meyer, “The Great Agricultural Transition: Crisis, Change, and Social Consequences of Twentieth Century US Farming,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 107-109.
The concept of family farms is important in North America in particular because rural social and economic structures in Canada and the U.S. have historically been based primarily around farms owned and worked by individual families. In the past these farms were the main producers of food in the agricultural sector, and have survived as family businesses long after family businesses in other sectors have ceased to have the same economic and social relevance.156
However, in the 1980s, looking at statistics starting from the 1970s, rural sociologists noticed a pattern which was described as “the disappearing middle.”157 In particular, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a report in 1981 entitled A Time to Choose, which adopted a three-part division of farm types.158 Marty Strange, writing in 1988, discusses the 3-farm model that emerged from this report, which divided farms into small, medium and large farms, based on size determined by gross farm income. This pattern of small, medium, and large farms became the standard way of understanding issues in American agriculture after the release of this report. 159
As Strange summarizes, small farms in this typology are dismissed as not really being farms by policy developers, since those who operate them either do not derive most of their livelihood from the farm itself, or are the few struggling farmers who constitute
156 Buttel and LaRamee, “The ‘Disappearing Middle,’” 151-169.
157 See for example: USDA, A Time to Choose; Buttel and LaRamee, “The ‘Disappearing Middle,’”151-169; Strange, Family Farming, esp. 64-66; Labao and Meyer, “The Great Agricultural Transition,” 103-124; Lyson, Stevenson, and Welsh, Food and the Mid-Level Farm.
158 USDA, A Time to Choose.
159 Strange, Family Farming, 64-65. From this emphasis on three farms emerges the concern over the loss of the medium or middle-sized farms. This concern has continued into current scholarship. See for example Lobao and Meyer’s review of the sociological literature in this area: Lobao and Meyer, “The Great
Agricultural Transition,” 103-124.
rural poverty. These small farms continue to persevere most likely through off-farm income.160
Strange continues in his summary of the USDA report to describe large farms as
“industrial agribusinesses,” which usually specialize in one or two commodities, and have few income problems. Some even qualify as high-income earners. These farms, Strange also notes, tend to be heavily in debt.161
Strange points out that medium farms are too big to be discounted as not really farms, but too small to profit financially from many of the changes, especially economic changes, that have taken place in agriculture as it becomes increasingly industrialized.
Vertical integration and contracts, for example, benefit larger farms much more than medium sized farms. This makes medium sized farms a problem for farming policy as understood from the USDA report.162 Medium farms are most closely connected with
“family farms” in this model. Thus, with the disappearance of the “middle” of agriculture, comes also the loss of the family farm.163
The pattern of change noted in the 1980s as the “disappearing middle” has indeed continued, as is evidenced by statistics leading up to the present day.164 This pattern of
160 Strange, Family Farming, 62.
161 Strange, Family Farming, 63-65.
162 Strange, Family Farming, 63.
163 Strange, Family Farming, 66.
164 Daft notes that when A Time to Choose was written, forecasters felt fairly confident in anticipating the future patterns in agriculture based on the patterns from the 1970s, only to have them completely
contradicted in what happened in the 1980s. See Lynn Daft, “A Look Back at the USDA Report on the Structure of Agriculture: A Time to Choose,” American Journal of Alternative Agriculture 8 (1993): 149. It may be because of this that writers such as Buttel and LaRamee, writing in the 1990s, were more hesitant to
the uneven distribution of farm production and farm income has continued, and is also reflected in the statistics from Canada. Looking at Canada as a whole, the number of farms divided strictly by gross farm income from 1991 to 2011 show the pattern continuing up to the present day.165
Fig. 3.1
Unlike the USDA, which divided farms strictly by gross annual farm receipts, Statistics Canada has used seven categories of farm types for comparison based on three factors: “age of operator, dependence on farm revenues and income level.”166 These
declare that the current trends such as the “disappearing middle” were in fact a viable trend. Buttel and LaRamee, “The ‘Disappearing Middle,’” 165-167.
165 Statistics Canada, Census of Agriculture Table 004-006. Found at
http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/cansim/a26?lang=eng&id=0040006&p2=17, accessed April 25, 2014. The numbers represented here are in 2010 constant dollars.
166 Statistics Canada, “Table 002-0029 – Distribution of farm families and average total income by typology group, unincorporated sector,” in 2011 Census of Agriculture
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