Fathers and Sons: Family Farms,Family Businesses and the Farming Industry

This paper is concerned with changes in relationships between parents and children in family farming businesses under contemporary relations of production. The family farm is today more effective as a management unit than as a labour unit. Farmers seek to expand the family business through the incorporation of children into an extended family. To this extent, family form and relationships between close kin are clearly articulated with market forces. However, the increasing capitalization and commercialization of family farming do not necessarily mean a lessening significance of kinship links. Rather, such processes serve to redistribute kin ties in new concentrations so that they have become more important in the management of a viable business and less significant between farmers in an agricultural industry.