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Farm

WorldBrand briefing

AI supplement

Original synthesis to sit alongside the encyclopedia article below. Not part of Wikipedia; verify facts on Wikipedia when precision matters.

A farm is a dedicated area of land (or managed space) focused on agricultural production, including growing crops, raising livestock, or cultivating other goods like fiber, fuel, and food. It is the fundamental production unit of agriculture, existing in a wide range of forms from small subsistence family operations to large-scale industrial agricultural enterprises.

Key moments

  • c. 10000 BCEFollowing the Neolithic Revolution, humans establish the first permanent settled farms, shifting from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to systematic agricultural production.
  • c. 3300 BCE (Bronze Age)Intensive farming systems develop in major early civilizations including Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Ancient China.
  • Iron Age/Classical AntiquityRoman expansion establishes the manorial farm system that becomes the core structure for medieval European agriculture.
  • 1492 CEThe Columbian Exchange reshapes global farming, introducing New World crops (maize, potatoes, tomatoes) to the Old World and Old World crops/livestock to the Americas.
  • 18th-19th century CEThe British Agricultural Revolution drives major improvements in farming techniques including crop rotation, irrigation, and fertilization, boosting productivity.
  • Early 20th century CEWidespread farm mechanization plus the industrial synthesis of synthetic fertilizer via the Haber-Bosch process dramatically increases global crop yields.
  • 20th century CEOrganic farming develops as an alternative to industrial farming, in response to concerns about synthetic inputs and environmental harm.

Non-Human Farming

While 'farm' is most often associated with human agriculture, some non-human species independently evolved farming behavior long before humans. For example, leafcutter ants have cultivated fungus as a food source in underground colony 'farms' for over 50 million years, managing growing conditions and maintaining specialized fungal crops. This demonstrates that managed food production in ecosystems is not a uniquely human innovation.

Modern Transformations and Challenges

Over the past century, farming has shifted dramatically in developed nations: the number of farms has fallen sharply while average farm size has grown, driven by mechanization and industry consolidation. While industrial farming has enabled massive gains in food production to support global population growth, it has also created significant environmental challenges including water pollution from fertilizer runoff, biodiversity loss, and greenhouse gas emissions. This has spurred growing interest in alternative farming models like organic agriculture, permaculture, and small-scale local farming.

Cultural and Economic Significance

Farms have been central to human society for millennia, shaping rural communities, cultural traditions, and global economies. Today, farms still underpin global food security, while also increasingly serving non-production roles including agritourism, biodiversity conservation, and carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change.

A farm (also called an agricultural holding) is an area of land that is devoted primarily to agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops; it is the basic facility in food production.[1] The name is used for specialized units such as arable farms, vegetable farms, fruit farms, dairy, pig and poultry farms, and land used for the production of natural fiber, biofuel, and other biobased products. It includes ranches, feedlots, orchards, plantations and estates, smallholdings, and hobby farms, and includes the farmhouse and agricultural buildings as well as the land. In modern times, the term has been extended to include such industrial operations as wind farms and fish farms, both of which can operate on land or at sea.

There are about 570 million farms in the world, most of which are small and family-operated. Small farms with a land area of fewer than 2 hectares operate on about 12% of the world's agricultural land, and family farms comprise about 75% of the world's agricultural land.[2]

Modern farms in developed countries are highly mechanized. In the United States, livestock may be raised on rangeland and finished in feedlots, and the mechanization of crop production has brought about a great decrease in the number of agricultural workers needed. In Europe, traditional family farms are giving way to larger production units. In Australia, some farms are very large because the land is unable to support a high stocking density of livestock because of climatic conditions. In less developed countries, small farms are the norm, and the majority of rural residents are subsistence farmers, feeding their families and selling any surplus products in the local market.

Etymology

The word in the sense of an agricultural land-holding derives from the verb "to farm" a revenue source, whether taxes, customs, rents of a group of manors or simply to hold an individual manor by the feudal land tenure of "fee farm". The word is from the medieval Latin noun firma, also the source of the French word ferme, meaning a fixed agreement, contract,[3] from the classical Latin adjective firmus meaning strong, stout, firm.[4][5] As in the medieval age virtually all manors were engaged in the business of agriculture, which was their principal revenue source, so to hold a manor by the tenure of "fee farm" became synonymous with the practice of agriculture itself.

History

Farming has been innovated at multiple different points and places in human history. The transition from hunter-gatherer to settled, agricultural societies is called the Neolithic Revolution and first began around 12,000 years ago, near the beginning of the geological epoch of the Holocene[7] around 12,000 years ago.[8] It was the world's first historically verifiable revolution in agriculture. Farming spread from the Middle East to Europe and by 4,000 BC people that lived in the central part of Europe were using oxen to pull plows and wagons.[9] Subsequent step-changes in human farming practices were provoked by the British Agricultural Revolution in the 18th century, and the Green Revolution of the second half of the 20th century.

Farming originated independently in different parts of the world, as hunter-gatherer societies transitioned to food production rather than food capture. It may have started about 12,000 years ago with the domestication of livestock in the Fertile Crescent in western Asia, soon to be followed by the cultivation of crops. Modern units tend to specialize in the crops or livestock best suited to the region, with their finished products being sold for the retail market or for further processing, with farm products being traded around the world.

Types of farms

A farm may be owned and operated by a single individual, family, community, corporation, or a company, may produce one or many types of produce, and can be a holding of any size from a fraction of a hectare[10] to several thousand hectares.[11]

A farm may operate under a monoculture system or with a variety of cereal or arable crops, which may be separate from or combined with raising livestock. Specialist farms are often denoted as such, thus a dairy farm, fish farm, poultry farm or mink farm.

Some farms may not use the word at all, hence vineyard (grapes), orchard (nuts and other fruit), market garden or "truck farm" (vegetables and flowers). Some farms may be denoted by their topographical location, such as a hill farm, while large estates growing cash crops such as cotton or coffee may be called plantations.

Many other terms are used to describe farms to denote their methods of production, as in collective, corporate, intensive, organic or vertical. Where most of the income is from some other employment, and the farm is an expanded residence, the term hobby farm is common. This will allow sufficient size for recreational use but be very unlikely to produce sufficient income to be self-sustaining. Hobby farms are commonly around 2 hectare but may be much larger depending on land prices.

Other farms may primarily exist for research or education, such as an ant farm, and since farming is synonymous with mass production, the word "farm" may be used to describe wind power generation or puppy farm.

Farm buildings

Farms have special buildings. Some buildings, such as barns, may hold animals. There may be separate buildings for chickens and pigs. On dairy farms, a milking parlor is an important building. It is where dairy cows are milked. The milk is kept in a milking parlor until a milk tanker comes to get it. There are also special buildings for keeping grain. A silo is a tall building where grains, such as wheat and oats are stored. Farmers also use small round metal buildings to store their grain. These buildings are called grain bins.

Specialized farms

Dairy farm

Dairy farming is a class of agriculture, where female cattle, goats, or other mammals are raised for their milk, which may be either processed on-site or transported to a dairy for processing and eventual retail sale There are many breeds of cattle that can be milked some of the best producing ones include Holstein, Norwegian Red, Kostroma, Brown Swiss, and more.[12]

In most Western countries, a centralized dairy facility processes milk and dairy products, such as ice cream, yogurt, butter, and cheese. In the United States, these dairies are usually local companies, while in the Southern Hemisphere facilities may be run by very large nationwide or trans-national corporations (such as Fonterra).

Dairy farms generally sell male calves for veal meat, as dairy breeds are not normally satisfactory for commercial beef production. Many dairy farms also grow their own feed, typically including maize, alfalfa, and hay. This is fed directly to the cows, or stored as silage for use during the winter season. Additional dietary supplements are added to the feed to improve milk production. [13]

Poultry farm

Poultry farms are devoted to raising chickens (egg layers or broilers), turkeys, ducks, and other fowl, generally for meat or eggs.[14]

Pig farm

A pig farm is one that specializes in raising pigs for bacon, ham, and other pork products. They may be free range, intensive, or both.

Ownership

Farm control and ownership have traditionally been a key indicator of status and power, especially in Medieval European agrarian societies. The distribution of farm ownership has historically been closely linked to a form of government. Medieval feudalism was essentially a system that centralized control of farmland, control of farm labor, and political power, while the early American democracy, in which land ownership was a prerequisite for voting rights, was built on relatively easy paths to individual farm ownership. However, the gradual modernization and mechanization of farming, which greatly increases both the efficiency and capital requirements of farming, has led to increasingly large farms. This has usually been accompanied by the decoupling of political power from farm ownership.

Of the approximately 570 million farms worldwide in 2025, 85% are smaller than 2 hectares, they cover just 9% of agricultural land. In contrast, farms over 1,000 hectares represent only 0.1% of all farms but manage half of the world’s farmland. Despite persistent constraints, nearly 500 million smallholders contribute significantly to global food supply. At the same time, larger farms, particularly those exceeding 50 hectares have a disproportionate influence on land use and food provision, positioning them as key actors in the global response to land degradation.[15] Farm size strongly influences land management and food production strategies, as well as farmers’ ability to address land degradation. Medium-sized farms, those between 2 ha and 50 ha – play a particularly important role in Africa and Asia, where they manage about half of all agricultural land. Larger farms often have more resources to invest in advanced technologies that optimize input use and productivity – but which can exacerbate land degradation. However, these farms may also have greater incentives to maintain land quality, if it is clearly linked to long-term profitability. Conversely, smaller farms often contend with more vulnerable land conditions, and struggle with limited resources and multiple market constraints.[16]

Farm size vary widely by region, in 2025 Latin America and the Caribbean had only 3% of farms because holdings are generally large; in Asia and Africa, smallhold farms of 2 to 50 ha worked around half the farmland; and in Europe, the Americas and Oceania, farms exceeding 1 000 ha controlled the greater part of farmland.[16]

The crops produced by small-hold farmers contributed in 2025 approximately 16% of global dietary energy, 12% of proteins, and 9% of fats derived from crops. Their contribution is was significant for certain crop types: farms smaller than 5 ha produce almost 50% of global stimulants, spices and aromatic crops, while contributing between 20% - 30% of cereals, fruits and vegetables.[16]

Significant gender inequalities exist in farm ownership in 2025, with women in 43 out of 49 countries with available data less likely than men to own or have secure rights to agricultural land. When women do have secure land rights, they increase investment in soil conservation, have greater crop diversity and improved household food security.[16]

Forms of ownership

In some societies (especially socialist and communist), collective farming is the norm, with either government ownership of the land or common ownership by a local group. Especially in societies without widespread industrialized farming, tenant farming and sharecropping are common; farmers either pay landowners for the right to use farmland or give up a portion of the crops.

Agribusiness

Low wages for farmworkers have resulted in farmworker shortages.[17]

Farms around the world

United States

The land and buildings of a farm are called the "farmstead".[18] Enterprises where livestock are raised on rangeland are called ranches. Where livestock are raised in confinement on feed produced elsewhere, the term feedlot is usually used.

In the US, in 1910 there were 6,406,000 farms and 10,174,000 family workers; In 2000 there were only 2,172,000 farms and 2,062,300 family workers.[19] The share of U.S. farms operated by women has risen steadily over recent decades, from 5 percent in 1978 to 14 percent by 2007.[20] In the United States, there are over three million farmworkers; 72% are foreign-born, 78% are male, they have an average age of 36 and average education of 8 years.[21]

In 2007, corn acres are expected to increase by 15% because of the high demand for ethanol, both in and outside of the U.S. Producers are expecting to plant 90.5 million acres (366,000 km2) of corn, making it the largest corn crop since 1944.[22]

Europe

In the UK, farm as an agricultural unit, always denotes the area of pasture and other fields together with its farmhouse, farmyard and outbuildings. Large farms, or groups of farms under the same ownership, may be called an estate. Conversely, a small farm surrounding the owner's dwelling is called a smallholding and is generally focused on self-sufficiency with only the surplus being sold.

In Europe, traditional family farms are giving way to larger production units where industrial agriculture and mechanization brings large crop yields.[9]

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is one of the most important policies of the European Union and is helping in the change of farms from traditional family farms to larger production units. The policy has the objectives of increasing agricultural production, providing certainty in food supplies, ensuring a high quality of life for farmers, stabilizing markets, and ensuring reasonable prices for consumers.[23] It was, until recently, operated by a system of subsidies and market intervention. Until the 1990s, the policy accounted for over 60 per cent of the European Union's annual budget, and as of 2013 accounts for around 34 per cent.[24]

Asia

Pakistan

According to the World Bank, "most empirical evidence indicates that land productivity on large farms in Pakistan is lower than that of small farms, holding other factors constant." Small farmers have "higher net returns per hectare" than large farms, according to farm household income data.[25]

Nepal

Nepal is an agricultural country and about 80% of the total population are engaged in farming. Rice is mainly produced in Nepal along with fruits like apples.[26] Dairy farming and poultry farming are also growing in Nepal.

Pakistan

According to the World Bank, "most empirical evidence indicates that land productivity on large farms in Pakistan is lower than that of small farms, holding other factors constant." Small farmers have "higher net returns per hectare" than large farms, according to farm household income data.[25]

Nepal

Nepal is an agricultural country and about 80% of the total population are engaged in farming. Rice is mainly produced in Nepal along with fruits like apples.[26] Dairy farming and poultry farming are also growing in Nepal.

Australia

Farming is a significant economic sector in Australia. A farm is an area of land used for primary production which will include buildings.

According to the UN, "green agriculture directs a greater share of total farming input expenditures towards the purchase of locally sourced input?(e.g. labour and organic fertilisers) and a local multiplier effect is expected to kick in. Overall, green farming practices tend to require more labour inputs than conventional farming (e.g. from comparable levels to as much as 30 percent more) (FAO 2007 and European Commission 2010), creating jobs in rural areas and a higher return on labour inputs."[27]

Often very small farms used for intensive primary production are referred to by the specialization they are being used for, such as a dairy rather than a dairy farm, a piggery, a market garden, etc. This also applies to feedlots, which are specifically developed for a single purpose and are often not able to be used for more general purpose (mixed) farming practices.

In remote areas, farms can become quite large. As with estates in England, there is no defined size or method of operation at which a large farm becomes a station.

Africa

A farm in Africa includes various structures. Depending on climate-related areas primarily farming is the raising and breeding of grazing livestock, such as cattle, sheep, ostriches, horses or goats. Predominantly domestic animals are raised for their meat, milk, skin, leather or fiber wool). You might even come across silk farms.[28]

Furthermore, there are plenty of hunting farms, guest farms and game farms. Arable] or irrigated land is often used for raising crops such as feed grains and hay for animal feeding.

On some farms (Astro Farm) star-gazing became very popular because of the excellent optical quality in the desert.[29] The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) which investigates cosmic gamma rays is situated on Farm Göllschau in Namibia.

Farm equipment

Farm equipment has evolved over the centuries from simple hand tools such as the hoe, through ox- or horse-drawn equipment such as the plough and harrow, to the modern highly technical machinery such as the tractor, baler and combine harvester replacing what was a highly labour-intensive occupation before the Industrial Revolution. Today much of the farm equipment used on both small[30] and large farms is automated (e.g. using satellite guided farming).[31]

As new types of high-tech farm equipment have become inaccessible to farmers that historically fixed their own equipment, Wired magazine reports there is a growing backlash,[32] due mostly to companies using intellectual property law to prevent farmers from having the legal right to fix their equipment (or gain access to the information to allow them to do it).[33] This has encouraged groups such as Open Source Ecology and Farm Hack[34] to begin to make open source hardware for agricultural machinery. In addition on a smaller scale Farmbot[35] and the RepRap open source 3D printer community has begun to make open-source farm tools available of increasing levels of sophistication.[36]

Sources

See also

  • Agrarian structure
  • Agricultural technology
  • Agroecology
  • Electrical energy efficiency on United States farms
  • Factory farming
  • Farm management
  • Gentleman's farm
  • List of organic gardening and farming topics
  • Museum of Scottish Country Life
  • Prison farm
  • Rural economics
  • Rural flight

Bibliography

External links

References

  1. Gregor, 209; Adams, 454.^
  2. Sarah K. Lowder, Jakob Skoet, Terri Raney. The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide World Development, 2016^
  3. Larousse Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise Lexis, Paris, 1993^
  4. Collins dictionary of the English language Collins, 1986^
  5. Cassell's Latin dictionary Funk & Wagnalls^
  6. J. Diamond, P. Bellwood. Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions Science, 2003^
  7. International Stratigraphic Chart International Commission on Stratigraphy, retrieved 2012-12-06^
  8. Graeme Barker. The Agricultural Revolution in Prehistory: Why did Foragers become Farmers? Oxford University Press, 25 March 2009, retrieved 15 August 2012^
  9. A History of Farming www.localhistories.org, retrieved 2016-04-04^
  10. Jo Winterbottom. SPECIAL REPORT – India's food chain in deep change Reuters, June 20, 2011, retrieved 12 July 2011^
  11. Anna Creek Station Wrightsair, retrieved February 17, 2012^
  12. Top Eighteen Best Milk Producing Cattle Breeds in the World farm-animals.knoji.com, retrieved 2016-04-04^
  13. ThinkQuest retrieved 26 October 2014^
  14. A Beginner's Guide to Poultry Farming The Alabama Poultry and Egg Association, retrieved February 18, 2012^
  15. FAO. The State of Food and Agriculture 2025 FAO, 2025^
  16. FAO. The State of Food and Agriculture 2025 FAO, 2025^
  17. Myat Thida Win, Zachariah Rutledge, Mywish K. Maredia. Labor shortages and farmer adaptation strategies Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 2025^
  18. Definition of FARMSTEAD www.merriam-webster.com, retrieved 2021-06-15^
  19. National Agricultural Statistics Service retrieved 2007-04-20^
  20. Hoppe, Robert A. and Penni Korb. (2013). Characteristics of Women Farm Operators and Their Farms. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.^
  21. Facts about Farmworkers National Center for Farmworker Health, retrieved March 29, 2013^
  22. Corn Acres Expected to Soar in 2007, USDA Says Newsroom, U.S. Department of Agriculture – National Agricultural Statistics Service, March 30, 2007, retrieved February 18, 2012^
  23. David Stead. Common Agricultural Policy EH.Net Encyclopedia, 22 June 2007^
  24. Agriculture European Union, 16 June 2016, retrieved 2021-10-30^
  25. Report No. 39303-PK Pakistan, Promoting Rural Growth and Poverty Reduction, March 30, 2007, Sustainable and Development Unit. South Asia Region. Document of the World Bank. p.50^
  26. Nepal: Priorities for Agriculture and Rural Development World Bank^
  27. Archived copy retrieved 2014-10-26^
  28. Namibia SME Portal Site Kalahari Wild Silk Retrieved Sept. 19, 2018^
  29. Info Namibia Star gazing Retrieved Sept. 20, 2018^
  30. Marie Lawrence. Big Bots in Little Agriculture Slate, 1 June 2012^
  31. From precision farming to autonomous farming: How commodity technologies enable revolutionary impact – Robohub robohub.org^
  32. Kyle Wiens. New High-Tech Farm Equipment Is a Nightmare for Farmers Wired^
  33. Kyle Wiens. We Can't Let John Deere Destroy the Very Idea of Ownership Wired^
  34. A worldwide community of farmers that build and modify our own tools. http://farmhack.org/app/^
  35. Open source CNC farming http://go.farmbot.it/^
  36. Pearce, J.M.(2015). Applications of Open Source 3-D Printing on Small Farms. Organic Farming 1(1), 19–35. DOI: 10.12924/of2014.01010019^