Constable
A constable is a person holding a particular office, most in criminal law enforcement. The office of constable can vary in different jurisdictions. A constable is the rank of an officer within the police. Other people may be granted powers of a constable without holding this title; the title comes from the Latin comes stabuli and originated from the Roman Empire. The title was imported to the monarchies of medieval Europe, in many countries developed into a high military rank and great officer of State. Most constables in modern jurisdictions are law enforcement officers. However, in the Channel Islands a constable is an elected office-holder at the parish level. A constable could refer to a castellan, the officer charged with the defense of a castle. Today, there is a Constable of the Tower of London. An equivalent position is that of Marshal, which derives from Old High German marah "horse" and schalh "servant", meant "stable keeper", which has a similar etymology. In Australia, as in the United Kingdom, constable is the lowest rank in most police services.
It is categorised into the following from lowest to highest: probationary constable, constable first class, senior constable, leading senior constable. These variations depend on the individual state/territory police force in question. Senior constable refers to a police officer of the rank above constable and is denoted by way of two chevrons/stripes; the New South Wales Police Force has three grades of senior constable, namely senior constable, incremental senior constable and leading senior constable. A senior constable is senior to a constable but junior to an incremental senior constable. Promotion to senior constable can occur after a minimum of five years service, one year as a probationary constable in addition to four years as constable and upon passing probity checks and an exam. Incremental senior constable is attained after ten years of service automatically. One is appointed the rank of leading senior constable on a qualification basis but must have a minimum of seven years service amongst other criteria in order to be eligible.
Leading senior constable is a specialist position of which there are limited allocated numbers within any section/unit or local area command. If an officer is transferred to another duty type or station, the officer is relieved of the position of leading senior constable, it is a position for field training officers who oversee the training and development of inexperienced probationary constables or constables. Within Victoria Police, a senior constable is the rank above a constable while above a senior constable is a leading senior constable; when first introduced into Victoria Police, the leading senior constable was a classification not a rank, somewhat like "detective". Leading senior constables were appointed to assist in the training and mentoring of more junior members; the last round of wage negotiations however saw leading senior constable become a rank in its own right, one that a lot of members will pass on their way from constable to sergeant though it is not necessary and is permissible to be promoted to sergeant direct from senior constable.
The general form of address for both senior constable and leading senior constable is "senior" and this is acceptable in courts. In Canada, as in the United Kingdom, constable is the lowest rank with most law enforcement services, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In Newfoundland the provincial police are the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary whereby all officers are addressed by the term "constable". In addition, the chief officers of some municipal police services in Canada, notably Vancouver Police Department, carry the title of chief constableIn Canadian French, constable is translated to agent, except in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police where it is translated as gendarme.) Appointments can further be separated into: Special constables RCMP special constables are appointed for specific skills, for example, aboriginal language skills. They are peace officers under the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act. Outside of the RCMP, special constables are not police officers but are appointed to serve certain law enforcement functions.
For example, SPCA agents or court/jail security officers. Auxiliary constables, or reserve constables, are volunteers with a policing agency, they only have peace officer status when engaged in specific authorized tasks only. Provincial civil constables deal with matters of a civil nature. In the Danish armed forces the ranks "Konstabel", "Overkonstabel" and "Overkonstabel af 1. Grad" are used for professional enlisted soldiers and airmen; the rank is more or less equal to a Private, Private 1st class and Lance corporal but higher than the rank "menig" which translates into "private" and only applies to drafted soldiers. In the Finnish Police, the lowest rank of police
Slavery
Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own and sell other individuals, as a de jure form of property. A slave works without remuneration. Many scholars now use the term chattel slavery to refer to this specific sense of legalised, de jure slavery. In a broader sense, the word slavery may refer to any situation in which an individual is de facto forced to work against their own will. Scholars use the more generic terms such as unfree labour or forced labour to refer to such situations. However, under slavery in broader senses of the word, slaves may have some rights and protections according to laws or customs. Slavery existed in many cultures since the time before written history. A person could capture, or purchase. Slavery was legal in most societies at some time in the past, but is now outlawed in all recognized countries; the last country to abolish slavery was Mauritania in 2007. There are an estimated 40.3 million people worldwide subject to some form of modern slavery.
The most common form of modern slave trade is referred to as human trafficking. In other areas, slavery continues through practices such as debt bondage, the most widespread form of slavery today, domestic servants kept in captivity, certain adoptions in which children are forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, forced marriage; the English word slave comes from Old French sclave, from the Medieval Latin sclavus, from the Byzantine Greek σκλάβος, which, in turn, comes from the ethnonym Slav, because in some early Medieval wars many Slavs were captured and enslaved. An older interpretation connected it to the Greek verb skyleúo'to strip a slain enemy'. There is a dispute among historians about whether terms such as unfree labourer or enslaved person, rather than "slave", should be used when describing the victims of slavery. According to those proposing a change in terminology, including Andi Cumbo-Floyd, slave perpetuates the crime of slavery in language. Other historians prefer slave because the term is familiar and shorter, or because it reflects the inhumanity of slavery, with "person" implying a degree of autonomy that slavery does not allow for.
Indenture, otherwise known as bonded labour or debt bondage, is a form of unfree labour under which a person pledges himself or herself against a loan. The services required to repay the debt, their duration, may be undefined. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation, with children required to pay off their progenitors' debt, it is the most widespread form of slavery today. Debt bondage is most prevalent in South Asia. Chattel slavery called traditional slavery, is so named because people are treated as the chattel of the owner and are bought and sold as commodities. Under the chattel slave system, slave status was imposed on children of the enslaved at birth. Although it dominated many different societies throughout human history, this form of slavery has been formally abolished and is rare today; when it can be said to survive, it is not upheld by the legal system of any internationally recognized government. "Slavery" has been used to refer to a legal state of dependency to somebody else.
For example, in Persia, the situations and lives of such slaves could be better than those of common citizens. Forced labour, or unfree labour, is sometimes used to refer to when an individual is forced to work against their own will, under threat of violence or other punishment, but the generic term unfree labour is used to describe chattel slavery, as well as any other situation in which a person is obliged to work against their own will and a person's ability to work productively is under the complete control of another person; this may include institutions not classified as slavery, such as serfdom and penal labour. While some unfree labourers, such as serfs, have substantive, de jure legal or traditional rights, they have no ability to terminate the arrangements under which they work, are subject to forms of coercion and restrictions on their activities and movement outside their place of work. Human trafficking involves women and children forced into prostitution and is the fastest growing form of forced labour, with Thailand, India and Mexico having been identified as leading hotspots of commercial sexual exploitation of children.
Examples of sexual slavery in military contexts, include detention in "rape camps" or "comfort stations," "comfort women", forced "marriages" to soldiers and other practices involving the treatment of women or men as chattel and, as such, violations of the peremptory norm prohibiting slavery. In 2007, Human Rights Watch estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 children served as soldiers in current conflicts. More girls under 16 work as domestic workers than any other category of child labor sent to cities by parents living in rural poverty such as in restaveks in Haiti. Forced marriages or early marriages are considered types of slavery. Forced marriage continues to be practiced in parts of the world including some parts of Asia and Africa and in immigrant communities in the West. Sacred prostitution is where girls and women are pledged to priests or those of higher castes, such as the practice of Devadasi in South Asia or fetish slaves in West Africa. Marriage by abduction occurs in many places in the world today, with a national average of 69% of marriages in
Nobility
Nobility is a social class ranked under royalty and found in some societies that have a formal aristocracy. Nobility possesses more acknowledged privileges and higher social status than most other classes in society; the privileges associated with nobility may constitute substantial advantages over or relative to non-nobles, or may be honorary, vary by country and era. As referred to in the Medieval chivalric motto "noblesse oblige", nobles can carry a lifelong duty to uphold various social responsibilities, such as honorable behavior, customary service, or leadership positions. Membership in the nobility, including rights and responsibilities, is hereditary. Membership in the nobility has been granted by a monarch or government, unlike other social classes where membership is determined by wealth, lifestyle, or affiliation. Nonetheless, acquisition of sufficient power, military prowess, or royal favour has enabled commoners to ascend into the nobility. There are a variety of ranks within the noble class.
Legal recognition of nobility has been more common in monarchies, but nobility existed in such regimes as the Dutch Republic, the Republic of Genoa, the Republic of Venice, the Old Swiss Confederacy, remains part of the legal social structure of some non-hereditary regimes, e.g. Channel Islands, San Marino, the Vatican City in Europe. Hereditary titles and styles added to names, as well as honorifics distinguish nobles from non-nobles in conversation and written speech. In many nations most of the nobility have been un-titled, some hereditary titles do not indicate nobility; some countries have had non-hereditary nobility, such as the Empire of Brazil or life peers in the United Kingdom. The term derives from the abstract noun of the adjective nobilis. In ancient Roman society, nobiles originated as an informal designation for the political governing class who had allied interests, including both patricians and plebeian families with an ancestor who had risen to the consulship through his own merit.
In modern usage, "nobility" is applied to the highest social class in pre-modern societies, excepting the ruling dynasty. In the feudal system, the nobility were those who held a fief land or office, under vassalage, i.e. in exchange for allegiance and various military, services to a suzerain, who might be a higher-ranking nobleman or a monarch. It came to be seen as a hereditary caste, sometimes associated with a right to bear a hereditary title and, for example in pre-revolutionary France, enjoying fiscal and other privileges. While noble status conferred significant privileges in most jurisdictions, by the 21st century it had become a honorary dignity in most societies, although a few, residual privileges may still be preserved and some Asian and African cultures continue to attach considerable significance to formal hereditary rank or titles. Nobility is a historical and legal notion, differing from high socio-economic status in that the latter is based on income, possessions or lifestyle.
Being wealthy or influential cannot ipso facto make one noble, nor are all nobles wealthy or influential. Various republics, including former Iron Curtain countries, Greece and Austria have expressly abolished the conferral and use of titles of nobility for their citizens; this is distinct from countries which have not abolished the right to inherit titles, but which do not grant legal recognition or protection to them, such as Germany and Italy, although Germany recognizes their use as part of the legal surname. Still other countries and authorities allow their use, but forbid attachment of any privilege thereto, e.g. Finland and the European Union, while French law protects lawful titles against usurpation. Although many societies have a privileged upper class with substantial wealth and power, the status is not hereditary and does not entail a distinct legal status, nor differentiated forms of address. Not all of the benefits of nobility derived from noble status per se. Privileges were granted or recognised by the monarch in association with possession of a specific title, office or estate.
Most nobles' wealth derived from one or more estates, large or small, that might include fields, orchards, hunting grounds, etc. It included infrastructure such as castle and mill to which local peasants were allowed some access, although at a price. Nobles were expected to live "nobly", that is, from the proceeds of these possessions. Work involving manual labour or subordination to those of lower rank was either forbidden or frowned upon socially. On the other hand, membership in the nobility was a prerequisite for holding offices of trust in the realm and for career promotion in the military, at court and the higher functions in the government and church. Prior to the French Revolution, European nobles commanded tribute in the form of entitlement to cash rents or usage taxes, labour or a portion of the annual crop yield from commoners or no
High sheriff
A high sheriff is a ceremonial officer for each shrieval county of England and Wales and Northern Ireland or the chief sheriff of a number of paid sheriffs in U. S. states who commands the others in their court-related functions. In Canada, the High Sheriff provides administrative services to the provincial courts; the office existed in what is now the Republic of Ireland but was abolished there in 1926. In England and Wales, the offices of high sheriff arose at the direction of the Local Government Act 1972 incepting on 1 April 1974; the purpose was to distinguish sheriffs of counties proper from sheriffs of cities and boroughs designated counties corporate. Except for the City of London, having 2 sheriffs, these cities and boroughs no longer have sheriffs, leaving the remaining in England and Wales as high sheriffs; the office is now an unpaid privilege with ceremonial duties, the sheriffs being appointed annually by the Crown through a warrant from the Privy Council except in Cornwall, where the high sheriff is appointed by the Duke of Cornwall.
In England and Wales the office's civil enforcement powers exist but are not exercised by convention. In England and Northern Ireland the high sheriff are theoretically the sovereign's judicial representative in the county, while the Lord Lieutenant is the sovereign's personal and military representative, their jurisdictions, the shrieval counties, are no longer co-terminous with administrative areas, representing a mix between the ancient counties and more recent local authority areas. The post contrasts with that of sheriff in Scotland, a judge sitting in a sheriff court; the word sheriff is a contraction of the term shire reeve. The term, from the Old English scīrgerefa, designated a royal official responsible for keeping the peace throughout a shire or county on behalf of the king; the term was preserved in England notwithstanding the Norman Conquest. The office of sheriff had its origins in the 10th century. While the sheriffs had been men of great standing at court, the thirteenth century saw a process whereby the office devolved on significant men within each county landowners.
The Provisions of Oxford established a yearly tenure of office. The appointments and duties of the sheriffs in England and Wales were redefined by the Sheriffs Act 1887. Under the provisions of the Local Government Act 1972, on 1 April 1974, the office known as sheriff was retitled high sheriff; the serving high sheriff submits a list of names of possible future high sheriffs to a tribunal which chooses three names to put to the Sovereign. The nomination is made on 12 November every year and the term of office runs from 25 March, the first day of the year until 1751. No person may be appointed twice in three years, unless there is no other suitable person in the county; the Sheriffs Act 1887 provides that sheriffs should be nominated on 12 November, or the Monday following if it falls on a Sunday, by any two or more of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Lord President of the Council, the Lord Chief Justice of England. These amendments were in 1998, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was granted full entitlement, not conditional entitlement, if there is no Lord High Treasurer – since the Treasurership is by constitutional convention always placed into commission, in 2006 the Lord Chancellor was removed as a nominating officer through the operation of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005.
These officers nominate three candidates for each county in England and Wales, which are enrolled on a parchment by the Queen's Remembrancer. Eligibility for nomination and appointment as high sheriff under the Sheriffs Act 1887 excludes peers of Parliament, members of the House of Commons, commissioners or officers of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, officers of the Post Office and officers of the Navy, Army or Royal Air Force on full pay and barristers or solicitors in actual practice; the practice of pricking is an ancient custom used to appoint the high sheriffs of England and Wales. In February or March of each year, two parchments prepared the previous November are presented to the Sovereign at a meeting of the Privy Council. A further parchment is presented to the Duke of Cornwall. Certain eligible persons nominate candidates for each county shrievalty, one of whom is chosen for each by the Sovereign. In practice, the first name on the list is nowadays always the one chosen; the Sovereign signifies assent by pricking the document with a silver bodkin by the relevant name for each county, signs the parchment when complete.
The parchment for the Duchy of Lancaster is known as the Lites, the ceremony of selection known as Pricking the Lites. The term lites, meaning list, was once reserved for Yorkshire; the Lites is used for the three ceremonial counties that fall wholly or within the boundaries of the historic county palatine of Lancaster: Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside. The practice is believed to date back to a year in the reign of Elizabeth I, lacking a pen, she decided to use her bodkin to mark th
Ellesmere Chaucer
The Ellesmere Chaucer, or Ellesmere Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, is an early 15th-century illuminated manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, owned by the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. It is considered one of the most significant copies of the Tales. Written most in the first or second decade of the fifteenth century, the early history of the manuscript is uncertain, but it seems to have been owned by John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford; the manuscript takes its popular name from the fact that it belonged to Sir Thomas Egerton, Baron Ellesmere and Viscount Brackley, who obtained it from Roger North, 2nd Baron North. The library of manuscripts, known as the Bridgewater Library, remained at the Egerton house, Hertfordshire, until 1802 when it was removed to London. Francis Egerton, created Earl of Ellesmere in 1846, inherited the library, it remained in the family until its sale to Henry Huntington by John Francis Granville Scrope Egerton, 4th Earl of Ellesmere.
Huntington purchased the Bridgewater library in 1917 through Sotheby's. The manuscript is now in the collection of the Huntington Library in California; the Ellesmere manuscript is a polished example of scribal workmanship, with a great deal of elaborate illumination and, notably, a series of illustrations of the various narrators of the Tales. As such, it was a de luxe product, commissioned by a wealthy patron; the manuscript is written on fine vellum and the leaves are 400mm by 284mm in size. Though the text was copied by a single scribe, the illustrations were executed by as many as three artists; the Ellesmere manuscript is thought to be early in date, being written shortly after Chaucer's death. It is seen as an important source for efforts to reconstruct Chaucer's original text and intentions, though John M. Manly and Edith Rickert in their Text of the Canterbury Tales noted that whoever edited the manuscript made substantial revisions, tried to regularise spelling, put the individual Tales into a smoothly running order.
Up until this point the Ellesmere manuscript had been used as the'base text' by several editions, such as that of W. W. Skeat, with variants checked against British Library, Harley MS. 7334. Linne Mooney identified Ellesmere's scribe as Adam Pinkhurst, a man employed by Chaucer himself, but recent scholarship has claimed that this identification is without merit; the same scribe appears to have been responsible for writing the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Tales, now considered the earliest, most authoritative, closest to Chaucer's holograph. This would imply, that the revisions seen in the Ellesmere manuscript would have been carried out by someone who had worked with Chaucer, knew his intentions for the Tales, had access to draft materials; the Ellesmere manuscript is conventionally referred to as El in studies of the Tales and their textual history. A facsimile edition is available; the Ellesmere mss at the Huntington Library Huntington catalogue images of Ellesmere Chaucer at Digital Scriptorium Full digital facsimile on the Huntington Digital Library Ezard, John,'The scrivener's tale: how Chaucer's sloppy copyist was unmasked after 600 years', The Guardian, 20 July 2004 Nagle, M.
Finding Adam, Umaine Today, November–December 2004
The Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. In 1386, Chaucer became Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace and, in 1389, Clerk of the King's work, it was during these years that Chaucer began working on The Canterbury Tales. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral; the prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return. After a long list of works written earlier in his career, including Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls, The Canterbury Tales is near-unanimously seen as Chaucer's magnum opus, he uses the tales and descriptions of its characters to paint an ironic and critical portrait of English society at the time, of the Church. Chaucer's use of such a wide range of classes and types of people was without precedent in English.
Although the characters are fictional, they still offer a variety of insights into customs and practices of the time. Such insight leads to a variety of discussions and disagreements among people in the 14th century. For example, although various social classes are represented in these stories and all of the pilgrims are on a spiritual quest, it is apparent that they are more concerned with worldly things than spiritual. Structurally, the collection resembles Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, which Chaucer may have read during his first diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372, it has been suggested that the greatest contribution of The Canterbury Tales to English literature was the popularisation of the English vernacular in mainstream literature, as opposed to French, Italian or Latin. English had, been used as a literary language centuries before Chaucer's time, several of Chaucer's contemporaries—John Gower, William Langland, the Pearl Poet, Julian of Norwich—also wrote major literary works in English.
It is unclear to. While Chaucer states the addressees of many of his poems, the intended audience of The Canterbury Tales is more difficult to determine. Chaucer was a courtier, leading some to believe that he was a court poet who wrote for nobility; the Canterbury Tales is thought to have been incomplete at the end of Chaucer's life. In the General Prologue, some 30 pilgrims are introduced. According to the Prologue, Chaucer's intention was to write four stories from the perspective of each pilgrim, two each on the way to and from their ultimate destination, St. Thomas Becket's shrine. Although incomplete, The Canterbury Tales is revered as one of the most important works in English literature, it is open to a wide range of interpretations. The question of whether The Canterbury Tales is a finished work has not been answered to date. There are 84 manuscripts and four incunabula editions of the work, dating from the late medieval and early Renaissance periods, more than for any other vernacular literary text with the exception of The Prick of Conscience.
This is taken as evidence of the Tales' popularity during the century after Chaucer's death. Fifty-five of these manuscripts are thought to have been complete, while 28 are so fragmentary that it is difficult to ascertain whether they were copied individually or as part of a set; the Tales vary in both major ways from manuscript to manuscript. Determining the text of the work is complicated by the question of the narrator's voice which Chaucer made part of his literary structure; the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Tales are not Chaucer's originals. The oldest is MS Peniarth 392 D, written by a scribe shortly after Chaucer's death; the most beautiful, on the other hand, is the Ellesmere Manuscript, a manuscript handwritten by one person with illustrations by several illustrators. The first version of The Canterbury Tales to be published in print was William Caxton's 1476 edition. Only 10 copies of this edition are known to exist, including one held by the British Library and one held by the Folger Shakespeare Library.
In 2004, Linne Mooney claimed that she was able to identify the scrivener who worked for Chaucer as an Adam Pinkhurst. Mooney a professor at the University of Maine and a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, said she could match Pinkhurst's signature, on an oath he signed, to his handwriting on a copy of The Canterbury Tales that might have been transcribed from Chaucer's working copy. Recent scholarship has cast severe doubt upon that identification. In the absence of consensus as to whether or not a complete version of the Tales exists, there is no general agreement regarding the order in which Chaucer intended the stories to be placed. Textual and manuscript clues have been adduced to support the two most popular modern methods of ordering the tales; some scholarly editions divide the Tales into ten "Fragments". The tales that make up a Fragment are related and contain internal indications of their order of presentation with one character speaking to and stepping aside for another character.
However, between Fragments, the connection is
Farmer
A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, raising living organisms for food or raw materials. The term applies to people who do some combination of raising field crops, vineyards, poultry, or other livestock. A farmer might own the farmed land or might work as a laborer on land owned by others, but in advanced economies, a farmer is a farm owner, while employees of the farm are known as farm workers, or farmhands. However, in the not so distant past, a farmer was a person who promotes or improves the growth of by labor and attention, land or crops or raises animals. Farming dates back as far as the Neolithic. By the Bronze Age, the Sumerians had an agriculture specialized labor force by 5000–4000 BCE, depended on irrigation to grow crops, they relied on three-person teams. The Ancient Egypt farmers relied and irrigated their water from the Nile. Animal husbandry, the practice of rearing animals for farming purposes, has existed for thousands of years. Dogs were domesticated in East Asia about 15,000 years ago.
Goats and sheep were domesticated around 8000 BCE in Asia. Swine or pigs were domesticated by 7000 BCE in China; the earliest evidence of horse domestication dates to around 4000 BCE. In the U. S. of the 1930s, one farmer could only produce enough food to feed three other consumers. A modern-day farmer produces enough food to feed well over a hundred people. However, some authors consider this estimate to be flawed, as it does not take into account that farming requires energy and many other resources which have to be provided by additional workers, so that the ratio of people fed to farmers is smaller than 100 to 1. More distinct terms are used to denote farmers who raise specific domesticated animals. For example, those who raise grazing livestock, such as cattle, sheep and horses, are known as ranchers, graziers, or stockmen. Sheep and cattle farmers might be referred to as shepherds and cowherds; the term dairy farmer is applied to those engaged in milk production, whether from cattle, sheep, or other milk producing animals.
A poultry farmer is one who concentrates on raising chickens, ducks, or geese, for either meat, egg, or feather production, or all three. A person who raises a variety of vegetables for market may be called a truck farmer or market gardener. Dirt farmer is one who farms his own land. In developed nations, a farmer is defined as someone with an ownership interest in crops or livestock, who provides land or management in their production; those who provide only labor are most called farmhands. Alternatively, growers who manage farmland for an absentee landowner, sharing the harvest are known as sharecroppers or sharefarmers. In the context of agribusiness, a farmer is defined broadly, thus many individuals not engaged in full-time farming can nonetheless qualify under agricultural policy for various subsidies and tax deductions. In the context of developing nations or other pre-industrial cultures, most farmers practice a meager subsistence agriculture—a simple organic farming system employing crop rotation, seed saving and burn, or other techniques to maximize efficiency while meeting the needs of the household or community.
One subsisting in this way may have been known as a peasant. In developed nations, however, a person using such techniques on small patches of land might be called a gardener and be considered a hobbyist. Alternatively, one might be driven into such practices by poverty or, ironically—against the background of large-scale agribusiness—might become an organic farmer growing for discerning consumers in the local food market. Farmers are members of local, regional, or national farmers' unions or agricultural producers' organizations and can exert significant political influence; the Grange movement in the United States was effective in advancing farmers' agendas against railroad and agribusiness interests early in the 20th century. The FNSEA is politically active in France pertaining to genetically modified food. Agricultural producers, both small and large, are represented globally by the International Federation of Agricultural Producers, representing over 600 million farmers through 120 national farmers' unions in 79 countries.
Farmed products might be sold either directly from a farm. In a subsistence economy, farm products might to some extent be either consumed by the farmer's family or pooled by the community. There are several occupational hazards for those in agriculture. Farmers can encounter and be stung or bitten by dangerous insects and other arthropods, including scorpions, fire ants, bees and hornets. Farmers work around heavy machinery which can kill or injure them. Farmers can establish muscle and joints pains from repeated work. Notes Bibliography Media related to Farmers at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of farmer at Wiktionary
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