ABSTRACT
How do family farms obtain the means with which to operate in relation to their social and economic environment? This topic is addressed in this chapter and the next. Our time focus is as close to the present day as we can get, but we have to rely on literature that goes back as far as the mid-twentieth century. It would be better to say of the sources, including that of Brookfield’s own field work, that we are writing of the ‘ethnographic present’. There is great dynamism in land tenure arrangements, and to understand this and extract the underlying principles we need to consider changes that have taken place in the past. The external relations of the farm inevitably intrude, but are mainly discussed in subsequent chapters. In family farming, as Polanyi (1944) pointed out, neither land nor labour are true commodities, and this is among the reasons why family farming has obstinately failed to vanish as predicted. To better follow the manner in which most family farming has become commercialized, we discuss the non-market aspects of access to land before we turn to the commercial ways of acquiring it. The same approach is used in chapters 4 and 5. We generalize, but recognize that every farm is different and every farming region unlike all others. The related question of water management is also discussed in this chapter.
