Talk:Family farm/Archive 1

The Family Farm and 'Sustainable Ag'
I would just like to point out that much of the organic or 'sustainable' foods marketed are no longer coming from family farms. Note that Wal-Mart has its own line of organic foodstuffs. Definitely not family farm material! I have modified the last paragraph to include a clause recognizing this fact. ScottK 17:28, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

References missing, citations needed
There's pretty much no material that's referenced. This article needs a major addition of references for where ever the material came from.. NathanLee 19:22, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

I agree. And as a family farmer, I would dispute the neutrality of this article. Much of it reads more like an opinion piece than an encyclopedia. 216.185.94.66 18:56, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Transplanted from Talk:Family farm/Comments
This article is full of unsubstantiated opinion and source-less balderdash. It bears no resemblance to an encyclopedia article. The original author(s) are enthralled with anti-industrialism and small-scale agriculture, oblivious to the fact the 6 billion people in the world need to be fed, and even more oblivious to the social and economic history of farming in the United States. Someone who actually knows something about agricultural production and agricultural history needs to re-write this article completely. Elcajonfarms (talk) 04:42, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

As sympathetic as I am to the philosophical basis of the article, an encyclopaedia entry should not be this biased! It is also biased heavily in favour of the situation in the United States. Moreover, a family owned farm might be as poorly run as any corporation, if not more so. Lots of problems here. Suggest scrapping it and seeing if it can't be re-jigged as an entry centring on the causes and consequences (environmental, economic, etc.) of changing ownership patterns in global agriculture. Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to pen such a piece. Thylacine1931 (talk) 11:51, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Apparently this article is a battleground for those for and against family farming. Parts of it now read like an "against" diatribe. GeneCallahan (talk) 14:51, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

shortening
i removed this section:Many view the family farm as a political ideal. Notable movements of this sort are primitivism, survivalism, some agrarian forms of isolationism, rural secession movements, and eco-anarchism. It may be easier to list the opponents of the family farm concept, notably those who promote large-scale agribusiness. The Big Agriculture approach, known to its critics as corporate farming, is in many ways the opposite of family farm ideals, by promoting corporate control of land and seed, and the unlimited application of centralized technologies.

it is very oppinionated and actually i don't agree about primitivism, survivalism etc being notable. trueblood 10:43, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

This article also has a number of Factual errors that experts within the Agricultural field would contest. Including, and certainly not the least of which is financing options. I am inclined to agree with 2092328106 that this article paints an overly water-coloured picture of the situation. Any Suggestions? Ares0524 21:43, 22 February 2007 (UTC)Ares0524

This article is US centric. Family farms were a major part of life in many coutries throughout the world, for example: small holders in Britian, colonial farms in Austrilia and New Zealand, traditional land holdings in India etc etc. I think this needs completely rewriting. It's opinionated and gramatically patchy. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.189.76.250 (talk) 14:37, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

mixed farming
I dont understand why mixed farming redirects to family farm. Mixed farming is characterized by technology such as the bullock plow, planting on ridges, and stall-feeding of work animals in order to concentrate cattle manure. Central to the technique is maintenance of soil fertility, which is achieved through use of manure, green manure, compost, and crop rotation. What does that have to do with family farms? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.22.134.251 (talk) 09:59, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
 * The Dutch define mixed farming as both raising crops and animals Dutch Wikipedia article. What do we call this practice?Jim Derby (talk) 14:41, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

what do make of this?
There is a valid article somewhere in there. The problem, as so often, is that the article makes a half-assed attempt to globalize, but after a couple of paragraph kind of throws up its hands and goes on talking about the United States exclusively.

This need not be a problem, you can write a valid article all about the United States, just make this explicit in the title and lead.

"Family farm (United States)" would seem like a good title. In fairness, the English-language family farm primarily refers to the US, and any more global meaning it may have is contrived, via artificial definitions or via loan-translation. There is "family farming" in the UK now, but I am quite sure this is an import from the US, the feudal tenant system was more or less the main reason for Anglo-Irish emigration to North America, 1680&ndas;1918 or so.

Elsewhere in Europe, German Bauernhof is the term for "farm" but it already implies "family farm" by default; if you want to be specific, you are reduced to contrived phrasings such as bäuerliche Familienbetriebe. Conversely, if you want to say "farm" in German without any implication of "family" you need to use something contrived like Landwirtschaftsbetrieb. This is because manoralism died 1848 or earlier. The term for "manor farm" would have been Meierhof, but this word has been effectively dead for a century. Latin Europe was mostly manoralism throughout, Slavic Europe was boyar-run except where it happened to end up in the Holy Roman Empire and partake in the Germanic system. My general conclusion is, "family farming" is the US term for the Germanic Hof system as imported by the Anglo-Irish and German settlers. For times predating 1918, in Germanic-influenced Europe, "family farm" isn't a term because it's almost redundant, implicit in the very term for "farm", and elsewhere in Europe it isn't a term because it didn't exist.

I see at least three pages waiting to be pulled from the wall of text I found here
 * A "global" article, family farming, written based on whatever the UN has to say about "family farming" with a global and contemporary scope (afaics focussing on the 400 million or so families surviving on subsistence farming in developing countries)
 * A historical article focussing on landed estate (Hof (estate)) in Germanic Europe, and the development vs. manoralism in the medieval period, vs. industrialisation in the modern period, and its influence in colonialism, emigration to the New World, the Russian Empire and African colonies
 * Family farm (United States), which can go into as much US-specific  historical, political and economic detail as it likes

Of course there can always be other regional spin-off pages from the "global" page, e.g. on Brazil. Most would do better as a redirect-to-section to an "Agriculture in ..." page, however, as in Agriculture_in_Brazil. Chances are, if your "Agriculture in ..." page doesn't have a section on family farms yet, your first step will be to create such a section (based on adequate references of course) and see where this takes you. --dab (𒁳) 16:37, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

Problematic claims regarding subsidies
The article states: “In industrialized countries, family farms have long become uncompetitive and have been supported by government subsidies since the interwar period. In the United States, such subsidies were introduced in 1924 (McNary–Haugen Farm Relief Bill), justified with the so-called farm problem of unpredictable fluctuations in farmers' income due to weather and the coming loss of viability as a result of Engel's law.[15]”

Reference 15 (Effland. 2000. U.S. Farm Policy: The First 200 Years) says nothing about Engel’s law or the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill; the citation appears to be used spuriously to support a claim apparently based on opinion. As the McNary-Haugen Farm Relief Bill was never enacted, it did not introduce subsidies. Several sources indicate that US agricultural subsidies were introduced in 1933 under the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Without credible support, the attribution of subsidy policy to Engel’s law should be deleted.

The claim that “family farms ... have been supported by government subsidies...” is not a valid generalization. For example, in the US, most family farms do not receive government subsidies. Also, the claim that “family farms have long become uncompetitive” appears to be an unwarranted generalization, and its juxtaposition with the problematic claim about subsidies is misleading. (See, for example, data on net cash farm income and government payments in the US 2012 Census of Agriculture.)   Schafhirt (talk) 18:03, 22 July 2015 (UTC)

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Economies of scale
We really need to explain economies of scale, both in quality control of outputs, and viability as a business. This reads as pastoralist crap that doesn't explain that a tiny red barn and a tower silo isn't just fading because of Evil Corporations, but because as a economic concept it's far too precarious.

--209.23.28.106 18:52, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Poland
I think that in the current Polish constitution, there is a requirement that the basic unit of agriculture shall be the family farm. If someone knows more about this, I think that this is something that should be put in this article. Boleslaw (talk) 02:17, 4 August 2011 (UTC)DB