The word is from the medieval Latin noun firma, also the source of the French word ferme, meaning a fixed agreement, contract, from the classical Latin adjective firmus meaning strong, stout, firm. 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". Acres can hold the crops.Įtymology A farmer harvesting crops with mule-drawn wagon, 1920s, Iowa, USA 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. 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 Europe, traditional family farms are giving way to larger production units. In the United States, livestock may be raised on range, land and finished in feedlots, and the mechanization of crop production has brought about a great decrease in the number of agricultural workers needed. Modern farms in developed countries are highly mechanized. 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. There are about 570 million farms in the world, most of which are small and family-operated. In modern times, the term has been extended so as to include such industrial operations as wind farms and fish farms, both of which can operate on land or at sea. It includes ranches, feedlots, orchards, plantations and estates, smallholdings, and hobby farms, and includes the farmhouse and agricultural buildings as well as the land. 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 commodities. The round fields are due to the use of center pivot irrigation Typical plan of a medieval English manor, showing the use of field stripsĪ 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.
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