Interesting question on r/saskatchewan today – what’s the difference between a “family farm” and a “corporate farm” with a wide range of opinions being shared.
For me, the main indicator of a “family farm” is any farm that has an owner who is a single individual (often including extended family members – a spouse, a parent, children, siblings). Frequently but not always, it’s a family that’s farmed the same land for decades if not centuries. To me, that criteria alone means it’s a “family farm” whether it’s incorporated or not, whether they also employee non-family hired hands, whether they still farm the section great-great grandpa got for ten bucks in 1885 or if they’ve grown to 10,000 acres.
In comparison, corporate farms are often owned by companies without a single identifiable owner or, if they do have one, it’s someone who has no long-standing connection the land (or the community nearest the land) – maybe someone recently arrived from another part of Canada or overseas, often backed by investors rather than using their own money (borrowed or not.)
What makes the question unanswerable is that farms can, and often do, have elements of both at the same time – family farms can have many characteristics of a corporate farm (if they’ve incorporated or have grown to a massive size) and corporate farms can have elements of a family farm (perhaps a single family from Germany or England or China buys a huge parcel of land, sets up shop, hires a bunch of workers while never setting foot in a tractor themselves) and operating like that.
So yeah, is there a difference? Maybe it’s one of those “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” situations?
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