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The Persistence of Family Farming in the Wake of Agribusiness: A New Brunswick, Canada Case Study*

Posted on: Tuesday, 5 July 2005, 12:00 CDT

INTRODUCTION

The Green Revolution foresaw agriculture industrialising to the point where small-scale, technologically "antiquated" farms dependent on family labour would completely disappear. Modern industrial farming would follow the path of all businesses-it would rely on leading edge technology, farm size would grow, hired labour would replace family labour, and specialisation would lead to the most cost-efficient operations. The small farms dotting the rural countryside would become a distant memory. In their place, a few highly efficient large farms would produce the world's foodstuffs.

A superficial look at the evidence seems to confirm that expectation. Post World War II, agriculture has steadily declined as an occupation in Canada. Today, 3% of rural Canadians live and work on farms while another 20% continue to live in rural areas (Dasgupta, 2001). While many rural people work in other rural occupations like forestry, fishing, mining and related industries or in traditional and non-traditional rural service sector jobs (such as country stores, banks, schools, hospitals and more recently ecotourism and home based businesses), the vast majority of rural New Brunswickers, and Canadians, commute to more urban areas for work. Those not engaged in rural sector jobs choose rural communities for their place of residence because they offer a pristine, safe, quiet, natural environment they can escape to after their day in the polluted, crime ridden, noisy, concrete city (Valentine, 1997). Interestingly, with the exception of western Canada, the rural non-farm population is on the rise across Canada (Dasgupta, 2001), testimony to the desire to escape urban pressures. On weekends and summer holidays, rural suburbia is often joined by other city dwellers seeking escape and leisure in a natural setting. These pursuits are supported by provincial tourism industries that heavily promote hiking trails, cottage rentals, and day long and weekly adventures that all give an important economic boost to small towns and rural communities.

Competing visions of rural life and subsequent land use questions are especially prevalent in New Brunswick where the research for this article was conducted.1 In this Atlantic Canadian province, 50% of the population, more than double the Canadian average, continues to live in rural areas. However, as elsewhere, slightly less than 3% percent of the rural population actually farm (Statistics Canada, 1997). As elsewhere, the greatest exodus from farming occurred after the Second World War, mainly due to low farm incomes. But unlike central and western Canada, this region continued to be heavily dependent on resource based industries like farming, fishing, and forestry. This area did not urbanise or industrialise at the rate of other areas and as a consequence of supplying inputs to industry rather than having manufacturing jobs, New Brunswick incomes remain low compared to the rest of Canada.

Despite its decline, agriculture continues to contribute a significant amount to the New Brunswick economy. In 1996, the province estimated farms contributed $155 million and agrifood contributed $370 million to provincial GDP (New Brunswick, 2001). Across Canada, each region is known for its particular agricultural commodities. In New Brunswick, potatoes accounted for 23% of all farm cash income, while dairy accounted for 21%, poultry and eggs for 19%, with other commodities accounting for less than 10% each (New Brunswick, 1996). A relative few large farms are responsible for most agricultural production, but small farms persist and continue to play a major role in the social fabric of rural communities. This article explores how and why small (subsistence, hobby, and small scale commercial) farms have persisted in the face of agribusiness and the pressure to "get big or get out" of farming (New Brunswick, 1974). In this article it is argued that these are the farms that have essentially maintained the vistas and agricultural infrastructure of rural New Brunswick. They are not a residual or marginal category of farm operations left behind by modernisation; instead, they represent a conscious economic strategy and approach to rural life.

HOW SMALL-SCALE FARMS PERSIST

Invariably, policy makers overtly and implicitly indicate "successful" family farms are those that have followed the path of modernisation. Nevertheless, not everyone has followed this path. In fact, a significant number have strongly resisted it. In New Brunswick, over onequarter of all dary and potato farms fall within the 1-17 cows/acres class size, yet they account for less than 4% and 1.5% of overall production, respectively. In fact, over 70 per cent of all dairy farms milk fewer than 47 cows, while approximately 63 per cent of all potato farms grow fewer than 127 acres of potatoes (Statistics Canada, 1992a, 1992c). Many of these farms are subsistence farms, others small commercial operations. The continued presence of so many small-scale, family farm operations is testimony that they are not a residual category, an anomaly to be brushed off.

How have these small family farms managed to continue in an era of modernisation? What strategies have they used to keep their families farming? This study suggests two tactics have been used in New Brunswick more than others: one is pluriactivity, the other is to spread the costs and risk of fanning by joining forces with other families and/or incorporating all members of the nuclear family into the endeavour.

PLURIACTIVITY

Pluriactivity refers to increasing the number of economic activities one engages in to sustain themselves. Pluriactivity- prototypically thought of as combining farming with off-farm employment-has been noted by many to be a survival strategy of many family farms (Conway, 1981; Fuller and Bollman, 1992; Gasson, 1986; Kasimis and Padadopoulos, 1995; Kimhi, 1994; Shucksmith and Smith, 1991), but mixed farming as a form of pluriactivity is less explored. This is examined here by the use of both strategies amongst the case study respondents.

Combining Farm and Off-Farm Work

Most people think of pluriactivity as families not relying entirely on agriculture for their livelihood but instead combining agriculture with other work. An examination of farm cash receipts suggests pluriactivity is the economic pattern for a significant number of farm operations in the province. In 1996,46.5% of New Brunswick's farms continued to gross less than $ 10 000 in farm cash receipts, evidence that small-scale agriculture has not been eliminated from the agricultural landscape (Statistics Canada, 1997). Many of these farms are likely to fall within the 1-47 acre size category for potatoes and 1-17 acre size category for dairy, as these farms represent 7.5 and 28.7% of all potato and dairy farms but account for less than 3.6 and 3.9% of all potato and milk production in the province (Statistics Canada, 1992b, 1992c). If those earning less than $10 000 in gross farm receipts are making their living solely from farming, their families are living in abject poverty because gross farm receipts refer to the gross income farms report from all sources (sales, investment, subsidies, interest) that were farm related. Gross farm receipts do not indicate or reflect profits earned. In other words, it does not consider farm expenditures, which must be subtracted. These extremely small farms are most likely to be the subsistence or hobby farms primarily reliant on off-farm wages. However, the research interviews indicate pluriactivity is also a strategy used by the "medium" sized commercial farms to continue operating.

In New Brunswick, "occupational pluralism" has been and continues to be a predominant feature of agriculture and helps explain the prevalence of small-scale, subsistence and hobby farms. From the outset of agricultural communities here, families combined subsistence and semi-commercial agriculture with waged work in tree- harvesting and lumber mills, various trades and crafts, and a variety of waged work in nearby towns. In 1951, the New Brunswick Department of Agriculture Annual Report (1951: 26) noted:

General conditions for dairying were not improved over the 1949- 1950 period. Beef prices were high in comparison with dairy products, the cost of mill feeds was heavy, and many dairy farmers were engaged in the temporarily more lucrative lumber industry at the expense of dairy production.

Historically the male farmer combined farm work with other seasonal jobs or with full-time employment. This would continue to be the case for subsistence and hobby farms. For example, one university colleague combined farming and academic employment for two decades before retiring from the professoriate to tend his cattle operation. However, today's commercial operations are more likely to rely on a farm wife's off-farm employment (Dion and Walsh, 1992; Gasson, 1984; Sachs, 1996). In this study, slightly more than one third of farm wives were engaged in cash generating activities at the time of the interview, another one third had done so previously, and slightly less than one third had never engaged in off-farm em\ployment; less than one quarter of the farm operations had men working off-farm. Off-farm employment for men tended to involve truck driving, mechanical work, construction, and woods work whereas women tended to do secretarial, sales, teaching, consulting, and childcare work.

Wives on potato farms were more likely to be engaged in regular, permanent cash generating activities than were wives on dairy farms. The difference in amount and duration of pluriactivity between dairy and potato farms is in part reflective of differences in the organisational and financial stability of the two industries. In New Brunswick, dairy farms sell their products through a marketing board that raises and stabilises farm incomes, while potatoes are sold on an insecure open market dominated by two large multinational food- processing firms with New Brunswick roots. Dairy farms guarantee a steady income and investing heavily in the farm operation makes economic sense. Potato farm income is uncertain and irregular; outside economic activities and income is needed to keep both household and farm going.

Pursuing Mixed Farming

While not usually recognised as pluriactivity, the discussions with farm wives indicated mixed farming (farming more than one crop) serves much the same purpose and involves a similar strategy of multiplying the number of economic activities of the family. Its prevalence is obscured in Canada by two factors: the failure to recognise diversity within commodity sectors, and the method by which Statistics Canada classifies farm commodity.

While many people think a potato is a potato and milk is milk, the production processes and marketing arrangements of these commodities means, for example, that growing some crops is more profitable than are others. Growing elite seed potatoes is more labour intensive than growing processing potatoes, but farmers will earn more from the former than the latter, making it economically feasible for a nuclear family to grow a small acreage and still earn a respectable living. Likewise, selling cream can be more profitable than selling fluid milk. Although the number of farms only selling cream in New Brunswick is minuscule, they can have an impressive return given all sales and profit are based on butterfat content sold to the Milk Marketing Board. Farm families make careful decisions about what mix of potato varieties to grow and for what markets-processing, table, or seed. Likewise, though they'are the exception and they have endured much pressure to succumb, not every dairy farm has embraced fluid milk as their end product.

The tendency not to draw these distinctions is compounded by the way the Canadian government categorises farm operations. Before 1971, farms could be counted in more than one commodity. However, from 1971 onwards, Statistics Canada started classifying farms according to the farm product that represented at least 51% of total farm production based on gross farm receipts. The research presented here indicates this new method of classification effectively exaggerates the amount of specialisation on farms. Many farm families are still not "putting all their eggs in one basket". They are maintaining farm diversity as a form of pluriactivity. They are not just potato farmers; they are potato and beef farmers or potato and grain and pea producers. Likewise, dairy farmers are also cattle dealers or potato farmers. When one commodity sector has low prices, their other commodities will carry the day. In the sample, one half of the "dairy" farms were mixed operations (9 of 18) combining dairy with beef, eggs, apples, potatoes, hogs, and/or turkey production. In comparison, only 2 of 14 "potato" farms did not market additional crops or animals. While there is a greater propensity for small farms to have mixed operations, farm diversity is not restricted to this group as mixed farms are found in all size categories.

What is significant is that mixed farms can juggle market fluctuations in a way that specialised farms cannot. In this way they are able to survive the ups and downs of each particular commodity sector as long as not all commodities they are producing take a downward turn at once.2 In fact, the more specialised farm operations become, the more difficult it is for farm families to shift their strategies and direction when the industry or markets experience upheaval. "A family can't live on potatoes alone", Priscilla reasoned.3 In effect, a specialised farm's dependence on a cash income to purchase the family's foodstuffs is in a much more vulnerable position than the family farm that produces much of its own foodstuffs. A reliance on strong markets can cause financial hardship, rising debt, or even bankruptcy during an economic downturn. If the farm fails, the family loses both its source of income and its home.4 In times of economic downturn, a priority is to cut production costs as much as possible.

GATHERING THE FAMILY UNTO THE FOLD

Labour is often the most expensive part of any business; hence the call to mechanise by employing more and more technology. Yet many family farms have persisted precisely because they have successfully drawn in extended family to expand their operations. They have effectively become bigger and capitalised on economies of scale by spreading the financial risks and labour needs within and across generations. While some scholars have acknowledged the presence of inter- and intra- generational farm operations, they have tended to be viewed as transitional phases of the family-farm life cycle rather than as a conscious scheme to keep the family farm operating in difficult times (Delphy and Leonard, 1986; Gasson and Errington, 1993; Sachs, 1996).

This literature acknowledges there will be moments of transition on family farms as one generation retires and the next generation takes over, but anything other than a nuclear family farming is perceived as a short-term, temporary stage in the natural progression (Delphy and Leonard, 1986; Gasson and Errington, 1993; Sachs, 1996). It is not discussed as an enduring modus operandi of family farms. The family-farm business cycle approach assumes two things: one, there is only one chosen successor-even Delphy and Leonard (1986, 1992) presented this as being the case in France-and other family members will be displaced or carry on working for the new "owner"; and two, one "nuclear" family or household can run an economically viable farm enterprise. It overlooks the ways families can bind together to share equipment, resources, and labour in order to allow more than one nuclear family to stay in farming. This is a reality Gasson et al. (1988:9) hinted at but did not pursue when they wrote, "A family may join several households as where economically cooperating siblings live separately, a common occurrence in British agriculture".

The data suggest nuclear family farms are only one amongst many family structures in New Brunswick agriculture. Only 7 of the 30 farms in this study-less than one quarter-had always been nuclear family farm operations. Most of these "always nuclear" operations were first generation dairy farms. Twelve of the family farms, seven potato and five dairy, were intergenerational family farms. The majority of these (nine) were husband/son operations while there was a case of a husband working with his father, a husband working with the wife's father, and one widowed wife working with her in-laws. Two farms were intragenerational farms with brothers farming together and one was a three-generation operation. The other eight farms were nuclear but had been inter- and intragenerational, following the conventional path in the literature.5 Overall, one half of the farms were spreading the costs of production and labour requirements between or amongst nuclear family farms. In this way farms effectively "get big" by amalgamating a number of smaller farms.

In this sample, the potato farms tended to be more extended family operations than dairy. Many of the women on the farms that were then nuclear but were intergenerational operations, indicated their father-in-laws still worked on the farm during peak periods even though they were no longer the owner-operators. Only one potato farm-Paige's-was and had always been farmed by just their nuclear family. Paige's farm also had the second smallest acreage in production amongst the potato farms. Dairy farms were more likely to be "nuclear" operations than potato farms. Six dairy farms had always been nuclear family operations while four were nuclear operations at the time of the study although they had not been in the past. Again, the differences were rooted in the security of dairy marketing arrangements and the inherent instability of those in potato marketing.

Essentially, the data suggested three family farm "structures" (strategies) for enlarging the farm beyond the nuclear farm operation were consistently used: inter-generational farms; intra- generational farms; and some combination of inter-/intra- generational farms.6 All three strategies enlarged the farm operation, and spread the risk across more family units. Hence, they were able to produce a crop for commercial sale while relying almost entirely on family labour. While there is no consensus over the language and terms to use, many other researchers have noted the presence of more than one kind of family farm in Canada.7 For example, it is common to read about small and large farms, part- time and full-time farmers, petite-bourgeois and capitalist forms of production, and family farms and family corporations in articles that discuss present day farming practices in New Brunswick and Canada (Canada, 1995; Ehrensaft and Bollman, 1986; Goddard et al., 1993; McLaughlin, 1990; Shaver, 1990; Statistics Canada, 1995, 1997; Trant, 1986). What these authors have noted are the various responses and strategies families have adopted in order to continue farmin\g. Not everyone has endorsed capitalist agriculture.

WHY RESISTANCE TO CAPITALIST AGRICULTURE IS IMPORTANT

Why is the persistence of small-scale commercial farming and subsistence and hobby farming important? There are a number of ways to answer this question, and they hinge on what is desired for the rural community, the farm community, and the food system of the future.

The efforts of an agribusiness corporation are directed at seeking to find a relative handful of contract farmers with the lowest possible price for feedstock to its food processing factories, markets for its high-tech farm inputs, and loan clients for its financial service arms. It will find the small farms of all types an irrelevance at best and an irritation or obstacle to the consolidation of land into its contractors' operations at worst. This also seems, in Canada at least, to be the point of view of state agencies concerned with agriculture, agrifood, or industry (Canada, 1981; New Brunswick, 1988).

Families on small farms are concerned about their survival on the land. They are keen to preserve their way of life in a highly unfavourable economic and policy environment. Where mixed farming is not enough to maintain household and farm operations, they are seeking to maintain farming as a piece of their life rather than their sole occupation.

There are several reasons why a nation and local communities might want to see the small farms survive. First, these small farms are the cornerstone of the rural landscape that draws many people to the countryside. These small farms are the majority of farms and they give the picturesque, rural farm community vistas that rural suburbia, tourists, and those pursuing leisure activities, like. Unlike many other rural economic activities they contribute to the scenery, not destroy it. They do not cut the trees and leave a barren landscape like forestry and mining. Like the decline of fishing emaciated coastal communities when the fishstocks collapsed, the rural farm landscape is in danger. Large-scale industrial factory farms are simply ugly isolated factories in the countryside. In New Brunswick, large-scale industrial pig farming is causing serious air and water pollution problems and engendering rural conflicts amongst different rural interest groups (Thomas, 1997). Small farms fit more harmoniously into the visual, the social, and the ecological landscape. It is their practices that created the rural landscape that rural dwellers and urban leisure-seekers were drawn to in the first place.

Secondly, these small farms are the demographic base of what remains of the farm community. A few hundred large farms do not a community make, and they will contribute nothing to any alternative food system to the one that suits agribusiness. Small farms are the basis of preserving the family-farm relationship, and these farms keep the family in farming. The logic of capitalist farms is that they are running a business like any other, seeking profit and expansion in the name of the accumulation of capital. The extent to which family farms attempt to separate family life from farm life is indicative of whether or not they are trying to maintain a way of life or to establish a successful business enterprise. For instance, some family farms have formalised their business identities by incorporating. They are public liability companies with shareholders, elected officers, and formalised business practices. Farms that have incorporated tend to formally separate family and farm finances as well. Given the presence of such formal business arrangements in the farm community, it should be possible to discern how separated or entwined family households and farm enterprises are by examining particular features of family farms. For example, whether or not they are incorporated, how many bank accounts they have, their overall size, the degree to which they rely on hired labour, and whether or not they want their children to farm. The more entangled the family and farm are, the more likely it is to be a "family farm" engaged in petite-bourgeois production. The greater the degree of separation between the family and the farm, the more likely it is to be a "corporate family farm" (McLaughlin, 1990; also see Hennon and Hildenbrand in this Special Issue).

Families that have continued to farm commercially on a small- scale represent a conscious resistance to "get big or get out". They want a livelihood from farming; they want to preserve the family- farm relationship, not seek their fortunes. Many have actively resisted the call to get bigger because they do not think large scale, ever more capital intensive, agricultural practices can be sustained in the long run. They believe that if you expand beyond the capacity of family labour possibilities, financial resources, and ecological and environmental parameters, then you are headed toward your demise. After all, as farms have capitalised, expanded, and mechanised, they have disappeared at an unprecedented speed.8 The majority of New Brunswick farms that followed the trend to expand were not able to withstand the debts they procured in order to expand production. High interest rates and continuing low prices for their commodities created severe financial problems for farms built on credit.9 To put it simply, most farms that attempted to engage in getting big to engage the capital accumulation cycle went bust. They expanded production, bought machinery, extended their credit, and at some point the anticipated accumulation cycle never materialised. There is a corollary: unless farming in Canada and elsewhere is to be done by a literal handful of corporations, it is small operations that will be there to do it.

These reflections raise two connected issues, namely questions about ecologically sustainable agriculture and the form of food system people want. If people want something other than the "fast food" system of more and ever more intensive and ecologically unsustainable agriculture, of farming as the supplier of cheap feedstock to food product manufacturers and grocery chains, or fast food megacorporations, it is necessary to sustain the small commercial family farm. These small operations are fliore likely to supply local farmers' markets than are larger commercial operations (which tend to be supplying the processors). They are irreplaceable in attempting to sustain a local food system outside the orbit of large corporations in retailing and food product manufacture.

Environmentally sustainable agriculture is not going to emerge from large scale, profit driven agricultural enterprises (Clow and McLaughlin, 2003). It is these operations that have pursued ever more intensive farming practices involving increased use of pesticides, insecticides, and petrochemical based fertilisers on ever larger monocrop acreage, and accepted genetically modified crops tied to patented inputs and techniques. It is widely recognised that sustainable agriculture means small scale, less intense agricultural practices and local food systems (Clow and McLaughlin, 2003). These require more, not fewer, small farms. It is precisely because existing small farms are retaining important tacit knowledge that they are a possible basis of maintaining and preserving a local food system. Committed to staying in farming, frequently far more concerned with preserving "the land" and looking for niche markets in which to survive, and less indebted to the banks, it is the reserve of small farmers people must look to in hoping to turn around the era of food system globalisation. The era of food system globalisation is where local knowledge, environmental integrity, and willingness to accept low profit margins as the price of other values are increasingly undervalued and lost.

The issue concerning small farms is what kind of "family farms" and rural communities does society want? Does society want to promote the industrial model of large scale factory farms where families are only nominally involved and the local infrastructure is eroded in the interests of large agribusiness and financial interests, or ones that provide a picturesque rural landscape where families are working together to grow foodstuffs, maintain local communities, and provide the material basis of local food systems?

IS BIGGER BETTER? POLICY IMPLICATIONS

An implicit argument of modern capitalist agriculture is it is a better model than traditional agriculture. Large scale, specialised operations are more economically profitable and hence more rational than small scale, mixed farming enterprises. In fact, many would argue these small farms persist in Atlantic Canada because it is an economically depressed region-a lack of resources and opportunities keeps farm families from successfully modernising their operations. Such an approach fails to appreciate the agency of farm families- the choices and decisions people actively make to continue engaging in a particular way of life. The people interviewed see themselves as conscious actors making good decisions to sustain and shape their family farms. One woman seeking to sustain a smaller operation explained:

It drives me crazy when people say it's farmers' mismanagement that drove them out of business. Farmers have good management skills. It's really the system....The government is pushing farmers to get big. They think bigger is better. I don't know why they can't see the mistakes they're making. The government just doesn't realise how easily the ecosystem can be screwed up. And they keep giving incentives for bigger farmers rather than small ones like us. We haven't encouraged our children to farm. There just isn't any farmland to be had, so I don't see how they could make a living from it.

The smaller, less technologically advanced farm operations do not want to be "modern" farmers incurring huge debts to expand beyond their family labour and financial means. They may \be risk adverse, but they are not backwards or anti-progress. They want to move forward but at a pace which is sustainable for both the environment and their family relations.10 This behaviour needs to stop being labelled by government officials and policy makers as backwards and traditional. After all, they have succeeded. They still exist. Moreover, they exist in too large a number to be an aberration. These farms have persisted while many of their neighbours, both big and small, have gone under.

Rather than focus on their failure to follow the modernist model of "get big or get out", it is important to explore the innovative ways they have managed to keep going-sometimes against all odds. This is especially important in this age of globalisation where the impulse is to expand and outsource to the point that local communities suffer while global corporations and speculators prosper. Those who seek to resist corporate globalisation can learn from these farmers that there are alternatives. There are ways to continue working and living in rural communities. It is not the behaviour of farm families that needs to change so much as it is the mindset of what constitutes progress. The experience of these farm families suggests bigger is not necessarily better. Perhaps all of us would do well not to forget E. Schumacher's (1989) claim, "small is beautiful". Besides, these two visions of agriculture have managed to persist. Unless one truly does idealise the factory in the field and the social goal of accumulating capital for its own sake, rather than promoting one strategy over the other, it might be more beneficial to look at the strengths of each model and recognise they both play a role in rural communities and modern agriculture.

Small farms might not be as "efficient" as large farms when looking at economies of scale, but they do help maintain a sense of community. They remind people of where their food comes from and they help local communities maintain their self-efficiency. They help promote biodiversity in both the ecosystem and socio-economic activities of rural communities. Without small-scale farming, societies would be totally reliant on the whims of multinational corporations that act in the best interest of profit margins rather than the people reliant on them, and which are pursuing a model of agriculture that may well be ecologically unsustainable (see Clow and McLaughlin, 2003). It is ironic that in an era where diversity is promoted, food producers continue to be pushed in one direction. Policy makers need to recognise that only diverse rural communities are sustainable ones. Thank goodness some farm families have been willing to challenge the policy makers and resist the trend. It is their persistent use of multiple strategies that means choice is still available. Consumers need to join them in their struggle and support them at the farm gate. Otherwise, monolithic, unsustainable agricultural practices will be all that prevails, and then not for long.

This article explores how and why small (subsistence, hobby, and small scale commercial) farms have persisted in the face of agribusiness and the pressure to "get big or get out" of farming. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted for a case study of dairy and potato farming in New Brunswick, Canada, the article argues off-farm employment, mixed farming, and inter-/ intragenerational family farming are strategies families have used to stay in farming despite pressures to expand and modernise. The article contends small-scale operations that have followed these strategies are the farms that have essentially maintained the vistas and agricultural infrastructure of rural New Brunswick. They are not a residual or marginal category of farm operations left behind by modernisation, but a conscious economic strategy and approach to rural life. It is these farms that are critical for the long-term maintenance of local communities and food production, yet they tend to be marginalised by agricultural policy makers.

* I would like to thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the New Brunswick Department of Labor and Education, and the British Council for financially supporting this research project. Additionally, Colin Bell and Dr. Lynn Jamieson provided excellent comments and assistance that helped me refine and develop the analysis of data throughout the research project.

1 This article emerged from material collected while studying the impact of farm commodity on farm wives' work in the dairy and potato industries. Thirty, semi-structured interviews were conducted from November 1995 to September 1996 in the interviewees' farm homesteads across rural New Brunswick. Each interview lasted from two to six hours and established the women's work and farm histories. While the subject of this article was not the focus of the initial study, it represents a strong sub-theme amongst the interviewees.

2 I think this is an important point to pursue in light of the export ban on Canadian beef due to the presence of one cow with BSE. The industry has not folded at the rate economic analysts predicted, no doubt because ranchers in the West have followed similar strategies to those in the East.

3 To enable the reader to easily establish what commodity group each woman belongs to I have given the women pseudonym names reflecting their commodity group. All the women whose names begin with the letter D are connected to dairy farms while those beginning with the letter P are connected to potato farms.

4 This position, of course, is based on the assumption that the family's primary source of income is the family farm enterprise. It does not take into account the "part-time" farmer who has another source of income nor the cash generating activities of farm wives that are not farm related, which are becoming more and more a feature of family farming.

5 While being involved in an "extended family" farm allows the family to keep farming and is more common and enduring in New Brunswick than the literature on family life cycles and farm business cycles would suggest, it can add immense stress and conflict to the nuclear family given complex family relationships. This is why many extended family operations eventually dissolve.

6 Of course, within each of these three strategies women and children also tend to be drawn into the work demands of the farm enterprise. So gathering the family into the fold does not only mean adding male farmers to the farm operation, but their extended families as well.

7 This literature falls within the mammoth volume of literature on family fanning in industrialised societies where extensive debates have occurred over the persistence of petite-bourgeois production within capitalist economies (the Marxist approach) and the prevalence of part-time and full-time farmers (the liberal economist approach). For a broader discussion of petite-bourgeois versus capitalist relations of production see Basran, 1992; Buttell et al., 1990; Clement, 1980,1983; Conway, 1981; Kasimis and Padadopoulos, 1995,1997; Koning, 1983; Shucksmith, 1993; Sinclair, 1984; Winson, 1996.

8 According to Pugh, every year in Canada 4000 families are forced out of farming (1991).

9 Basically, as the structure of agriculture has changed, the inputs and outputs of farming are increasingly controlled by a few highly integrated agri-business corporations. As vertically integrated agribusiness corporations control everything in agriculture, farmers are regularly forced to pay more for their inputs from agribusiness than they recover from their sales to agribusiness. In other words, the costs of farming are usually greater than the income from farming. This phenomenon, known as the cost-price squeeze, has been suggested by many as the reason that family farms are disappearing (Kneen, 1995; Koski, 1982; McLaren, 1977; McLaughlin, 1990; Pugh, 1989; Senopi, 1980).

10 Repeatedly people commented on their desire for farming to continue within their family, but their fears were that it would not be possible in the present soci-economic climate that rewards capital intensive rather than labour intensive operations.

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SUSAN MACHUM**

** Department of Sociology, St. Thomas University PO Box 4569, Fredericton, New Brunswick E3B 5G3, Canada. Email: smachum@stthomasu.ca

Copyright University of Calgary, Department of Sociology Summer 2005

Source: Journal of Comparative Family Studies

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