Many different issues about farming are tied to the concept of “family farms.” This concept touches on the agrarian vision of early pioneers in Canada and the U.S., and it touches on the backbone of rural community life resting on the families that make up the surrounding farming community. It touches on the values of family, hard work,
148 Both Wendell Berry and Marty Strange, for example, present farming with this binary, as discussed in more detail below. See especially Wendell Berry, “A Defense of the Family Farm,” in Home Economics:
Fourteen Essays (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 1987), 162-178; and Strange, Family Farming, 32-42. The CFFO also does this in some of their literature, again discussed in more detail below. Mark Graham strongly criticizes industrial trends in agriculture, but does not use the term “family farm” as his contrasting model, although he is discussing many of the same issues, with perhaps greater environmental emphasis.
Mark Graham, Sustainable Agriculture: A Christian Ethic of Gratitude (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2005), 78-139. Gary Fick does, however, emphasize the model of “family farm” in his analysis. See Gary W. Fick, Food, Farming, and Faith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 115-128.
149 The three-farm model, as noted above, was used in the influential United States Department of Agriculture report “A Time to Choose.” See: United States Department of Agriculture, A Time to Choose:
Summary Report on the Structure of Agriculture (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1981).
150 Statistics Canada, for example, has historically taken this much more detailed model of comparing farms. Buttel and LaRamee note that when they were writing in 1991, the statistics from Canada were much more detailed than those generally available from the United States, allowing them to make more detailed comparisons of the situation of farms by size and type in Canada than they were able to in the U.S..
See Frederick Buttel and Pierre LaRamee, “The ‘Disappearing Middle:’ A Sociological Perspective,” in Towards a New Political Economy of Agriculture, ed. William H. Friedland, et al. (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1991), 156.
community, and the practice of farming at a “human” level that Wendell Berry
discusses.151 How “family farm” is defined, and how the practices and realities of family farming have changed over the decades, especially in the 20th and early 21st centuries, is an area of concern for many, both within and outside rural areas. Today those advocating for the importance of family farming often contrast it with industrial farming. However, farming is much more diverse than can be adequately described by putting all farms into two types. What is important about a family farm is not just a matter of size, or of farming practices. Factors like ownership, capital, and labour are all important in differentiating between types of farms.
Beginning in the 1980s sociologists recognized an emerging pattern among farms in North America that they described as “the disappearing middle”: the number of
smaller and larger farms was increasing, and the number of middle-size farms was decreasing.152 Also, the economic significance of these middle-sized farms was
decreasing. These middle-sized farms had previously produced the majority of the food sent to market in North America. Increasingly a few very large farms are taking over this role, both in producing a much larger share of the overall agricultural produce, and also capturing an even larger share of the overall receipts of the agricultural sector.153
151 See for example Wendell Berry, “A Defense of the Family Farm,” in Home Economics, 163-178.
152 See for example Buttel and LaRamee, “The ‘Disappearing Middle,’” 155-56; Frederick L.
Kirshenmann, “A Bright Future for ‘Farmers of the Middle,’” in Cultivating An Ecological Conscience:
Essays from a Farmer Philosopher, ed. Constance L. Falk (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010), 317-318;
George Stevenson, et al. “Agriculture of the Middle,” in Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, ed.
Paul Thompson and David Kaplan (Berlin: SpringerReference [www.springerreference.com] Springer-Verlag, 2013) (online); Tomas A. Lyson, G. W. Stevenson, and Rick Welsh eds., Food and the Mid-Level Farm: Renewing an Agriculture of the Middle (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2008).
153 Buttel and LaRamee, “The ‘Disappearing Middle,’” 155-56; Strange, Family Farming, 63. This issue is discussed in more detail below.
These middle farms are most closely connected with farms that are also family farms, which is to say farms owned by a family, in which the family members do the majority of the labour, and expect to sustain the family on the living earned from the farm. Thus these changes in the rural farm economy also touch on the issues of the values and social relationships that are changing along with the change in the types of farms that form the basis of the farming economy and rural communities. Those in favour of
“saving the family farm” often argue, at least in part, that the value of these farms lies in their social and environmental value, as much or more than in their economic value, especially as they increasingly produce less and less of the total agricultural output, and take in less and less of the overall agricultural gross receipts.154 The CFFO as an
organization certainly examines these issues, and also does make these arguments in some of its literature. Farmers themselves, living on and operating family farms of various sizes, have to struggle with the question of where they place their own values, including what changes from within their own business operations they wish to allow, and what changes they will resist, in order to keep farming while at the same time maintaining the values they espouse. For the CFFO, values are intimately connected to religion—in this case their core Christian values.
Part of what is at issue in the debate about farm size is the question of values.
Different farming methods and farm sizes allow or restrict a farmer’s ability to express certain values through farming work. The concern over the disappearance or the decrease in the number and influence of farms of middle size, or farms run by and for families, is
154 For a contrary argument to the environmental value of middle-sized farms, read Harvey S. James and Mary K. Hendrickson, “Are Farmers of the Middle Distinctively ‘Good Stewards?’ Evidence from the Missouri Farm Poll, 2006,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23 (2010): 571-590.
part of this concern over the effect of farm size on values connected with farming. These values include the importance of community, neighbourliness, work ethic, stewardship of land and animals, quality of food produced, and family relationships, which are all tied to the concept, if not the practice, of family farming. Family farming is often connected with the concept of agrarianism, but the two are not necessarily synonymous, especially as family farms continue to change, often becoming more and more industrialized.