The Family Farm

This is a topic suggestion on writing about the Family Farm from Paper Masters. Use this information or order a custom research paper, written exactly how you need it to be on how the family farm is an important part of the history of the United States.

The Family Farm is the mythic backbone of America.Indeed, Thomas Jeffersons dream republic consisted of yeoman farmers, tied to the land, and subsisting as an independent unit.This structure in American society is so powerful that its perceived demise in the 1980s led to the high-profile Farm Aid concerts organized by Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp. Research papers point out this very theme in their study of family farms in the United States: "The Family Farm, then, was an integral part of the foundation upon which an entire country was built and is an institution rich with cultural, economic, and sociopolitical meanings and images". You can learn more about the current state of the family farm from this 2010 governmental report. Also, great topics for research papers on the family farm may be as follows:

• Is the family farm still viable today?
• Trace the history of the family farm in the United States
• Did "Farm Aid" and like benefit events actually assist the family farm?

Despite the changing nature of farming throughout the past two centuries, the core belief of what a family farm is (and/or should be) is largely unchanged:

a family farm should support a family, the family should manage and retain control of the farming resources, and less than a designated amount of labor should be hired.

This being said, the traditional family farm has had a traditional division of labor. Women have been called "invisible farmers" because their contribution to the labor does not involve direct agricultural or animal husbandry. "The traditional definitions of farm work focus on the work of the owner and manager, and frequently the work of women on farms goes unnamed and unrecognized".

In many ways, it can be argued that the traditional division of labor on The Family Farm, divided between the sexes, is a characteristic from the pre-Industrial era.Francis Underwood, who published a reminiscence of his New England boyhood in 1893, noted that New England men moved heavily, the demands of unmechanized agricultural labor gave men a distinctively ponderous gait and posture.Despite the strength and endurance such labor gave these men, they were "heavy, awkward and slouching in movement," and walked with a "slow inclination from side to side". Farm work was physically demanding, and the domain of men. Women's contributions to farm labor are generally referred to as "help." It was called this because women were not paid for their work and the chores farm women were in charge of making the unit self-sufficient, rather than profitable. However, bookkeeping was always considered to be one of the wife's duties.

However, traditional family farms were not always able to subsist solely on the agricultural output of the land. Around the turn of the 19th century, "put-out" work became essential to the survival of many family farms. Many small farms subsisted on a combination of small-scale agriculture, husbandry and put-out work, such as knitting and wool manufacture.