Marxian political economists have grappled with the “agrarian question” since the late nineteenth century, when European Marxists confronted the vitally important question of making sense of the agrarian peasantry’s role in the rapidly emerging European capitalist economies. Framed in this way, the agrarian question presented urgent theoretical and practical political challenges as Marxian revolutionaries considered what class alliances might best serve to push forward the communist project. The question of the relationship between agriculture and capitalist development has continued to fuel debate since Marx and his followers first confronted what was then called “the peasant question.” Over 125 years later, the agrarian question remains a puzzle.
Three critical areas of interest have emerged within the literature since the agrarian question was first formulated (Byres 1986; Bernstein 1996). These three areas can be traced to their origins in the works of the Classical Marxists. The first area is represented by Engels’ investigation of the politics of the European peasantry, with a focus on the French and German socialist party platforms and possibilities for political alliances. The second evolved from the first and involves the examination of the possibilities for capitalist transformation in agricultural production. The third engages the matter of agriculture and its role in the economic development of the broader economy. Each of these themes will be explored in turn, as well as major works associated with them, in hopes of providing a balanced overview of a somewhat neglected but provocative strand of thought within the Marxian tradition.
By the late nineteenth century, it was evident that Marxist theorists needed to come to terms with the continued political and economic importance of the peasantry across Europe. Capitalist industrial development in European societies had failed to displace what Marxists commonly viewed as a backward, anachronistic vestige of a pre-capitalist society. The agrarian question was thus motivated by the dilemma of incomplete or blocked capitalist (or later socialist) development. The existence of a peasantry was viewed as an undesirable indicator of this dilemma. The expectation that successful development requires (and is an indicator of) the marginalization or extinction of peasants and vice versa has been embedded in the agrarian question discussion since its inception.
Since the peasant had not yet faded from the scene in the course of economic development, it was necessary to examine his politics. Where would he stand in relation to the socialists’ aspirations to capture political power? Would he be reactionary or revolutionary? Thus, the agrarian question began as the “peasant question.”
In his extensive work on the agrarian question, T. J. Byres (1986) identifies politics as the first of three broad themes, or “problematics” established in the works of the European Marxists of the late nineteenth century. For him, Engels’ 1894 work, The Peasant Question in France and Germany, most clearly exemplifies the political problematic from which the other two themes, production and accumulation, emerged.
Surveying the European economic landscape, Engels noted that the dominance of peasant agriculture in most regions of Europe at the time meant that peasants were “a very essential factor of the population, production and political power” (Engels 1894, 2). Peasants, who owned or rented the land they worked with their families, occupied a middle class, a “survival of a past mode of production” (Ibid., 4) that was neither fully capitalist exploiter nor dispossessed proletarian. This ambiguous middle ground rendered the peasants’ political allegiances vulnerable to manipulation and false promises from “the wolf in sheep’s clothing of the big landowner” or the bourgeoisie, for whom “it has not been particularly difficult to render the socialist workers suspicious and odious in the minds of the peasants..., as lazy, greedy, city dwellers who have an eye on the property of the peasants” (Ibid., 2–3). Thus, Engels argued the socialist party could no longer afford to ignore the countryside in the political struggle, lest the sleeping giant be mobilized on behalf of their enemies. “[M]ay this party calmly leave the doomed peasant in the hands of his false protectors until he has been transformed from a passive into an active opponent of the industrial workers?” (Ibid.).
For Engels, it was the lower strata—the “small” and “middle” peasants—of the economically differentiated European peasantries whose material interests would most closely align with those of the industrial working class, and hence the socialist party. Indeed, Engels argued, in many ways the economic circumstances of the small peasant were even more precarious than those of the proletariat, trapped as he was under an onerous burden of debt and ever-intensifying global competition, and locked in a losing battle to save his land. It was his “deep-rooted sense of property” (Engels 1894, 5) that not only distorted his political allegiances, but hastened his economic ruin, as well. “It is precisely the individual farming conditioned by individual ownership that drives the peasants to their doom. If they insist on individual operation, they will inevitably be driven from house and home and their antiquated mode of production superseded by capitalist large-scale production” (Ibid., 14). For Engels, there was no doubt that the small peasant, “like every other survival of a past mode of production, is hopelessly doomed. He is a future proletarian” (Ibid., 5).
Hence, Engels concluded that the resolution of the “peasant question” was really no resolution at all. The socialist party would take the side of the small peasants, but could not promise to protect their property unless they were prepared to “make them a promise which we ourselves know we shall not be able to keep” (Engels 1894, 13). The only tenable position for the party was “to make clear to the peasants again and again that... it is absolutely impossible to preserve their small holdings for them as such, that capitalist large-scale production is absolutely sure to run over their impotent antiquated system of small production as a train runs over a pushcart” (Ibid., 15).
Engels’ analysis of the “peasant question” was driven by practical political concerns and lacked a systematic theoretical analysis. It was Karl Kautsky, arguably the most influential Marxist theoretician of the time, who did the work of applying and extending Marx’s theory to the countryside. The results of that project, based on his empirical study of German agriculture, were published in his 1899 work, The Agrarian Question. Upon its publication, Lenin wrote, “Kautsky’s book is the most important event in present-day economic literature since the third volume of Capital. Until now, Marxism has lacked a systematic study of capitalism and agriculture. Kautsky has filled this gap” (Lenin 1899a, 94). Lenin himself had just completed the manuscript of his own work on Russian agriculture, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, published a few months later. Kautsky’s and Lenin’s works constitute the principal expositions of the “production problematic” of the agrarian question.
Like Engels, Kautsky was motivated by concern for the politics of the German peasantry, but in addressing that concern, he shifted his focus from the political to the economic. This shift reflects a materialist conception that political actions and interests would follow from economic actions and interests. Kautsky, like Engels, assumed that the basis for socialism in the countryside was the proletarianization of the peasantry. Kautsky wrote, “Two souls inhabit the breast of the dwarf-holder: a peasant and a proletarian” (1899, 324). The proletarian soul could only be strengthened, and the revolutionary potential of the peasantry realized, if the mass of small peasants became dispossessed wage laborers. Hence, the key to the political analysis lay in understanding how capitalist development would unfold in the countryside. As Kautsky explained, his purpose was to consider “whether, and how, capital is seizing hold of agriculture, revolutionizing it, making old forms of production and property untenable and creating the necessity for new ones” (12, emphasis in original).
Like Engels, Kautsky recognized that the processes of economic differentiation among the peasants were important and so examined these processes in detail. Kautsky began with the presumption that theoretically, peasant agriculture was destined to suffer the same fate as petty commodity production in manufacturing. Capital accumulation and competition would favor the concentration and consolidation of peasant farms into larger production units, their owners transformed into members of the rural bourgeoisie. Smaller farms would be competed away, their inhabitants transformed into rural wage laborers working for the remaining large capitalist farms. Hence, as in industry, the process of capitalist development in agriculture would generate the opposing classes of capitalist farmer and rural proletarian.
Empirical evidence, however, did not support the predicted demise of small peasant farmers. On the contrary, the 1895 German census indicated “the small farm has not lost ground to the large since the 1850s,” and in fact, “small farms seem to be growing in some areas” (Kautsky 1899, 11). Kautsky argued, therefore, that Marx’s theory of capitalist development could not simply be applied to agriculture. “Agriculture does not develop according to the pattern traced by industry: it follows its own laws” (Ibid.). Kautsky identified several obstacles to capitalist transition in agriculture. While large farms were still technically superior and more efficient, small farms could nevertheless survive, perhaps indefinitely, due to a variety of factors, including the “over-exploitation” of peasant labor-power through self-exploitation and exploitation of family labor. This ability of peasants to reduce their own consumption or to expand their work in response to competition would lower their average cost of labor power relative to hired farm labor. In addition, small peasants would be functional to capitalist development in the countryside by providing a part-time labor force to the larger capitalist farms. Hence, Kautsky’s empirical analysis indicated that peasant agriculture could be integrated into capitalist agriculture without dissolution.
In spite of his complex and nuanced economic analysis, Kautsky’s political conclusions reflected the stereotype of peasants as a conservative, largely passive base for the traditional social order and collapsed back into a more simplistic view of historical necessity. For him, the very tendency for peasants to over-exploit themselves that was the source of their competitive advantage would keep them forever backward and impoverished. “We have to confess that as far as we are concerned the sub-human diet of the small peasant is no more an advantage than its superhuman industriousness. Both testify to economic backwardness” (Kautsky 1899, 116). This, along with their isolation and ignorance of their true interests, “often harnessing the same vigour used by other classes for their emancipation in the cause of their own exploiters,” trumped any revolutionary potential. He recommended that the socialists neutralize rather than mobilize the peasantry (Ibid., 10).
The Agrarian Question was not translated into English until 1988, in part because of Kautsky’s break with the Russian Marxists over the Russian Revolution. Unlike “Renegade Kautsky,” Lenin remained in the good graces of what became “Official Marxism” after 1917. Hence, while Kautsky’s work was extremely influential in the pre-World War I period in Europe, Lenin’s work was much more widely translated and read. The Development of Capitalism in Russia was his effort to extend Marx’s theory to the analysis of Russia. He began work on the book in 1896 while in prison, and completed it three years later while in exile in Siberia. In spite of these limitations, Lenin was able to base his analysis on a detailed and extensive census of peasant households in Russia known as the Zemstvo statistics, which he painstakingly analyzed in this work.
Like Kautsky, Lenin emphasized processes of peasant differentiation as the key to understanding the rise of capitalist agriculture. He identified two different paths of transition. These were the Prussian Path, or capitalism from above, and the American Path, or capitalism from below.1 Lenin argued that the Russian peasantry was already in a state of disintegration, or “depeasantisation,” and that the formation of the rural bourgeoisie and proletariat was in progress. Among the factors shaping this process of capitalist transformation in agriculture were technological change, intensified global competition and increased use of debt to maintain peasants’ consumption.
For Lenin, unlike for Kautsky, the peasantry held great revolutionary potential. The harsh conditions of self-exploitation, or what he called “plunder of labour,” made the small peasants more amenable to political alliance with the workers. The large numbers of small peasants, rural proletarians and semi-proletarians meant that such an alliance was necessary in order for the revolution to succeed (Lenin, 1899b).
The second agrarian question highlighted by Kautsky’s and Lenin’s work on the character of farm production was extremely influential in the pre-WWI period in Europe. The center of Marxian influence and scholarship on the agrarian question shifted, however, with the Russian Revolution in October 1917. After the Revolution, the practical concerns of managing economic development and agrarian change in the Soviet Union came to dominate work on the agrarian question. The overriding concern for Russian Marxists became how to transform and industrialize the ruined Russian economy and avoid political unrest. Hence, Russian Marxists turned their attention to the accumulation question, or how peasant agriculture in the largely rural and agrarian economy could be used to finance capital accumulation and transformation in the rest of society.
The economy of the newly formed Soviet Union, crippled by World War I and civil war, had reached a crisis point by 1921. Economic output remained far below pre-war levels. Growing unrest between and among both workers and peasants threatened to unravel the worker-peasant alliance upon which the revolution was based. Lenin enacted the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 in an attempt to ameliorate the crisis. The NEP formed the context for the bitter inter-party struggle known during the 1920s as the “industrialization debates” ignited by Lenin’s death in 1924. The chief intellectual architect of the right-wing strategy behind the NEP, which remained official policy until 1928, was Nikolai Bukharin. Opposite him was Evgenii Preobrazhensky, the principle theoretician of the left opposition led by Leon Trotsky. Preobrazhensky’s detailed intervention in the debate was The New Economics, published in 1926.
While both sides of the debate agreed that industrialization was necessary in order to preserve socialism, at issue was the appropriate pattern and pace to achieve that goal. The success or failure of any plan hinged on the peasantry. Economically, the NEP appeared to be a success—both industrial and agricultural output recovered pre-war levels by 1927—but it came with its own set of ideological and political contradictions. It allowed the growth of private markets in agriculture, albeit tightly controlled and managed, alongside the state-controlled sectors. As such, it represented a partial retreat from the state planning that was identified with socialism.2 Bukharin argued that this type of retreat was necessary to placate the peasantry, who could easily “veto” industrialization policy by refusing to purchase industrial goods or by consuming and hoarding their produce. Because of this veto power, Bukharin argued that the Soviet Union should allow rural conditions to dictate the pace of industrialization. He advocated a policy of “snail’s pace” industrialization and “balanced growth” between agriculture and industry (Preobrazhensky 1921, n.p.).
Preobrazhensky, on the other hand, worried that allowing capitalism to develop in the countryside would produce a powerful class of rich peasants and merchants with an interest in overturning the revolutionary aims of socialism and the means to do so.3 Thus, the political dangers of the NEP would ultimately overwhelm any economic gains. Preobrazhensky argued that the Soviet Union must accomplish self-consciously and within a few decades what had occurred spontaneously over several centuries for countries such as England and Germany. He developed the concept of “primitive socialist accumulation,” analogous to Marx’s primitive capitalist accumulation, to capture this idea.
Primitive socialist accumulation was “a period of the creation of the material prerequisites for socialist production” (Preobrazhensky 1926, 81). Isolated as it was, the Soviet Union had to rely on internal surpluses to generate primitive accumulation, or on the raw materials, food and workers, freed from non-industrial production and required to foster the growth of the industrial sector. As Preobrazhensky explained, “petty production serves as the nutrient base both for capitalist and for socialist accumulation” (Ibid., 78). He favored a strategy of manipulating the “price scissors” or terms of trade between agriculture and industry, rather than direct taxation, in order to avoid political backlash. By raising the price of industrial relative to agricultural goods, the state could siphon surplus from the peasants and transfer it to industry. For Preobrazhensky, the period of primitive socialist accumulation must be relatively brief due to the unstable political situation. As he explained, “How to pass as quickly as possible through this period, how to reach as quickly as possible the moment when the socialist system will develop its natural advantages over capitalism, is a question of life and death for the socialist state” (Ibid., 89).
Underlying the primary contributions to these agrarian questions is an implicit vision of capitalism (or socialism) and its relation to the peasant. As Gibson-Graham discusses, the capitalism that appears in most Marxian accounts, including those discussed above, has certain essential properties: unity, singularity and totality. Capitalism is unified in the sense that it is a self-contained, self-regulating whole. Internal laws of motion propel it almost inexorably along a universal, prescribed path of development. It is singular in the sense that is has no peer or rival. It tends not to exist with non-capitalist economic forms, and when it does, it is dominant. Others forms are marginal, residual and contingent—a sign of underdevelopment. Capitalism is total in the sense that it contains and subsumes all else within it. There is no “outside” of capitalism (Gibson-Graham 2006, 253–9).
This vision of capitalism bears on the agrarian question literature as well. In producing its knowledge of the peasant, it therefore produces its knowledge of capitalism and vice versa. As we have seen, “peasant” and “capitalist” are assumed to be mutually exclusive categories. Peasants are therefore engaged primarily in non-capitalist forms of economic activity. Of the two, “capitalist” is a more developed, more efficient and desirable economic form. Such non-capitalist or pre-capitalist forms precede and must ultimately give way to capitalism. (Likewise, capitalism is an essential prerequisite for socialism.) The existence of peasants is a sign of backwardness and incomplete development. If peasants do continue to exist within (not alongside) capitalism, their presence is something that needs to be explained (or explained away)—to be fixed on the Marxian theoretical landscape in a way that both acknowledges their existence but effectively denies them autonomy or efficacy. As we will see, this continues to be relevant for agrarian questions today.
As we have seen, the classical agrarian question had three layers of meaning, politics, production and accumulation. Each layer emerged from the one before as Marxists sought to respond to urgent concerns of the time. These questions, in various forms, remain just as urgent today. Peasant farms are still the dominant forms of agricultural production worldwide. The classical agrarian questions concerning issues of economic development and agrarian transition most clearly still pertain in the case of poor, developing countries. Indeed, most contemporary literature focuses on this aspect of agrarian questions. (See Bernstein 1996; Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010a; Akram-Lodhi and Kay 2010b for detailed reviews.)
Agrarian questions, however, remain just as pertinent in industrialized countries such as the United States, where capitalist development has gone farthest in transforming the food and agriculture system. Even in such highly developed capitalist economies, peasants remain the dominant agents of agricultural production. There, peasant farms are known as family farms.4 The family farm remains politically influential, culturally iconic and numerically ubiquitous. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, 97 percent of the 2 million farms in the United States in 2014 were family farms (MacDonald 2014).5
Family farms are embedded in what is known as an “industrial agriculture complex,” sandwiched between sprawling capitalist behemoths known collectively as “agribusiness.” Across the twentieth century, farmers were encouraged to transform their farms into “factories in the field” by applying industrial logic to farm production. The result was the rise of large-scale, specialized farms that mass-produce standardized products and with less need for skilled labor (or labor of any kind) thanks to mechanization and the adoption of other new technologies embodied in purchased inputs. Farmers now purchase the chemical, biological and mechanical inputs they previously produced themselves. As a result, the modern industrial farmer is surrounded by an array of massive capitalist enterprises supplying inputs, as well as transporting, processing, packaging and marketing the outputs of farm production. While farming itself accounts for a vanishingly small share of economic output in the United States, the industrial agriculture complex is populated by some of the world’s largest corporations—economic and political powerhouses.
Family farms have been transformed within capitalism, but not necessarily to capitalist farms themselves, although this question, along with the definition of family farm, is by no means settled. Indeed, much of the agrarian question literature that does pertain to industrialized countries tends to focus on explaining the conundrum of the family farm. (See Reinhardt and Barlett 1989; McLaughlin 1998 for reviews of this literature.) For those who subscribe to the particular view of capitalism discussed above, a family farm – or non-capitalist entity – is something that does not belong in a capitalist economy. As such, its continued presence is dealt with in various ways. One strategy is to continue to argue that the family farm is already, or is in the process of becoming, capitalist. A second strategy is to attribute the conundrum to certain obstacles to capitalist development in agriculture, without which the family farm is unable to fend off the forces leading to its demise. The two strategies often go together. Richard Lewontin, for example, employs both strategies in arguing that the “maturing of capitalism” in agriculture has been forestalled until very recently due to farmers’ decision-making authority over agricultural production processes. The rise of agribusiness has been accompanied by a loss of this authority, and is a harbinger of farmers’ proletarianization (Lewontin 2000).
Other theorists have dissented from this predominant view, contributing to an alternative literature in which family farms are not cast as passive, anachronistic economic forms, paradoxically existing in the crevices of a capitalist economy, but as dynamic, robust, adaptable, complex and stable non-capitalist forms, existing alongside and participating in a capitalist economy. Notable among these dissenters is the Russian economist A. V. Chayanov, whose work The Theory of Peasant Economy was published in 1925. Using the same data that Lenin used for his study, supplemented with his own and his students’ fieldwork, Chayanov argued that peasant or family farming was an efficient and viable mode of production that could compete successfully with capitalism in agriculture. This is because farm families, lacking the imperative to turn a profit while paying market wages, could rely on the flexibility of unpaid family labor in order to reduce costs (Chayanov 1925).
Chayanov’s work inspired renewed debate about family farms when the English translation was published in 1966. Since then, others have contributed to this dissenting perspective in examining the multiple survival strategies and adaptations that family farms have employed to survive in the United States. In one recent example, E. A. Ramey (2014) identifies various survival strategies employed by Midwestern family farms across the twentieth century, including the adoption of new farming technologies and intense rates of exploitation of unpaid family labor. Participation in off-farm wage labor, she argues, has increasingly become a strategy facilitating the survival of non-capitalist family farms, not their transition into capitalist forms. (For a review of further literature on the resilience of family farms see Brookfield 2008.)
Thanks to industrial agriculture and the strategies family farmers have employed in order to adapt to a changing environment, family farmers in the U.S. rank among the most productive humans in history. Yet in the twenty-first century, industrial agriculture is fraught with controversy. This same system has been implicated in a growing array of serious human health, environmental, social and ethical concerns. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) provided a popular account of some of these issues, and along with a virtual cascade of other scholars and journalists writing for a popular audience, has helped inspire a burgeoning alternative foods movement.
Marxian theorists have engaged with various topics in this literature, including corporate power, democracy and inequality; environmental sustainability and climate change; hunger and obesity; issues with applying machine logic to natural systems; and alienation, deskilling and loss of farmer autonomy. Robert Albritton’s Let Them Eat Junk (2009) provides an overview of the numerous problems associated with industrial agriculture from a Marxian perspective. For him, “the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate profit, stands in contradiction to agriculture, which has to concern itself with the whole gamut of permanent conditions of life required by the chain of human generations” (Marx in Albritton 2009, 2). Like other Marxian theorists, his purpose is to demonstrate that capitalism is fundamentally inconsistent with a rational food provisioning system.
Increasing numbers of people are coming to recognize that the food and agricultural system is broken. Indeed, it is a compelling example of what is wrong with a capitalist economy. They are rebelling against the system and establishing alternative food chains and practices. Perhaps no other issue has inspired such broad-based, popular support for systemic change and acceptance of the critique of capitalism. Food and agriculture issues present a unique opportunity for Marxian theorists, as experts on systemic critique with a large body of work on agrarian transition, to support this movement.
Clearly then, a new set of agrarian questions is relevant. What role does the family farm play in producing the contradictions associated with industrial agriculture? What role might it play in the transition to a non-capitalist, non-exploitative alternative agriculture? How might transformation in the food and agriculture sector ramify throughout the economy in capitalist and non-capitalist spaces? Fully engaging this new set of agrarian questions to interrogate the potential role of family farms in social change requires adopting an alternative underlying discourse of capitalism, however.
The view of capitalism as unified, singular and total, with all of its predictions about the prognosis for peasants and family farms has not been borne out historically or in contemporary societies. The result has been to marginalize Marxian scholarship in this area as the existing scholarship on agrarian questions in industrialized countries has largely been focused on whether and how family farms persist within industrialized economies. Caught in the narrow confines of a particular vision, much of the agrarian question literature has therefore lost its relevance and political urgency. Indeed, it seems unclear how it offers a distinct alternative to neoclassical considerations of agriculture, which share a similar disdain for family farms. The implication is that Marxian theoretical work on family farms and their role in any future agricultural transition is underdeveloped. What is needed are complex, nuanced and systematic analyses of the role of non-capitalist entities like family farms in capitalist societies. The dissenting analyses discussed above represent steps toward this alternative perspective.
Rescuing the family farm from the margins of Marxian scholarship requires building on this work by developing an alternative discourse of capitalism and exploring agrarian questions along these lines. Gibson-Graham argues for a vision of capitalism that is “uncentered, dispersed, plural, and partial in relation to the economy and society as a whole” (Gibson-Graham 2006, 259). In this way, space is opened to imagine, expect, and identify the presence of non-capitalist entities, including non-exploitative ones, in society today, and to ask new questions about their role in social change. No longer is capitalism an all-encompassing monolith that must be changed all at once or not at all. With non-capitalist spaces opened up, the possibilities for effective political and economic interventions are thereby multiplied. With such a perspective, alternative forms of agricultural production—including family farms—become viable and visible on their own terms, rather than in relation to capitalism. This allows for recognition that such forms can succeed and have already taken hold—not just in some distant past or future, but today. Imagining capitalism and the family farm in this way opens up the possibility for revitalizing work on agrarian questions, and for Marxian scholars to fully engage these crucial contemporary issues.
1 In the Prussian Path, capitalist farmers emerge from the class of former feudal lords. In the American Path, capitalist farmers emerge from an increasingly differentiated peasantry (Byres 2012).
2 For a detailed discussion of how the Soviet “socialism” was actually state capitalism, see Resnick and Wolff 2002.
3 Indeed, the NEP did just that. Faced with internal upheaval and the threat of foreign intervention, Stalin was forced to end the NEP and adopt a brutal industrialization program, the first of the Five Year Plans, in 1928.
4 Perhaps reflecting the belief in peasant backwardness shared by Marxist and non-Marxist alike, great pains have been taken in the United States to differentiate the “peasant” from the “family farmer.” A notable exception among Marxists is Rosa Luxemburg who refers to U.S. family farmers as peasants in The Accumulation of Capital (1913). Byres’s definition of peasant farming as “production by petty producers using their own means of production and their own labor (although not necessarily exclusively so)” fits family farming as well (Byres 2012, 11). Hence, the difference between “peasant” and “family farmer” seems to be nothing more than semantics (Brookfield 2008, 111). It should be noted, however that the definition of “family farm” is a widely debated subject complicating the agrarian question literature.
5 No existing “official” definition of family farms includes any explicit mention of class. For example, the definition of a family farm developed by the USDA distinguishes family farms on the basis of property and power. That is, a family farm is one whose “principal operator and people related to him or her by blood or marriage own most of the farm business” (MacDonald 2014). The principal operator is defined as “the person who is responsible for the on-site, day-to-day decisions of the farm or ranch business.” Clearly, this definition subsumes a wide variety of farms under the single category of family farm, including ancient and feudal enterprises run primarily with family labor to large capitalist enterprises run primarily with hired labor. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization definition adds a further criterion: participation in farm labor processes. In this definition, the farm family must not only own and manage the farm business, but also provide most of the farm labor. By this more restrictive definition, family farms account for 87 percent of farms and 57.6 percent of agricultural production in the United States (MacDonald 2014).
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