Do family farms have to be small-scale?
Farms may be family-controlled at any scale, but there is an essential connection between family farms and an agrarian culture that is intimately connected to local communities and ecosystems – to local fields, woods, streams, soils and weathers. As Wendell Berry has pointed out, an agrarian economy is always a subsistence economy before it is a market economy. The center of an agrarian farm is the household. This means that small-scale farms (around 1-100 acres), and mid-size farms (100-1000 acres) can be family farms, but large-scale farms of thousands of acres lose their connection to a place.
