A smallholding or smallholder is a small farm operating under a small-scale agriculture model. Definitions vary widely for what constitutes a smallholder or small-scale farm, including factors such as size, food production technique or technology, involvement of family in labor and economic impact. Smallholdings are usually farms supporting a single family with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming. As a country becomes more affluent, smallholdings may not be self-sufficient, but may be valued for the rural lifestyle. As the sustainable food and local food movements grow in affluent countries, some of these smallholdings are gaining increased economic viability. There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farms in developing countries of the world alone, supporting almost two billion people.
Woman smallholder farmers in Kenya. In many parts of Africa and other parts of the world, women are the primary smallholders. In many contexts, women face unequal access to land, markets, knowledge, and other assets needed to maintain their farms.
Small vegetable farm in Hainan, China
A smallholder coffee farmer in Colombia contributing her coffee to an agricultural cooperative. Cooperatives give small farmers an opportunity to be more competitive in markets, especially markets like coffee and cocoa where many of the purchasers are large businesses with high market power.
An old dairy farm used as a hobby farm near Leicester, New York
A family farm is generally understood to be a farm owned and/or operated by a family. It is sometimes considered to be an estate passed down by inheritance.
Historical farming estate Stoffl in Radenthein, Carinthia, with an 18th-century arrangement of a main building, a granary and two buildings used as stables and barns.
Barn of a Wisconsin family farm, inscribed with the foundational year (1911).
The Scharmoos estate in Schwarzenberg in the Swiss canton of Lucerne, owned by the Schofer family during c. 1670–1918.
Dispersed settlement landscape in Carinthia.
