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Smallhold farming

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See: https://ourworldindata.org/smallholder-food-production

Contrary to popular belief, its not true that 70-80% of the worlds food is made by smallholders. Its more like a third. This comes from confusion between the terms family farm and smallholder farm. Family farms do produce 80%, but family farms can be huge conglomerates.

Most (84%) of the world’s 570 million farms are smallholdings; that is, farms less than two hectares in size[1]

smaller farms get higher land productivity, but lower labor productivity.

The best work on this has been done by Ricciardi et al. 2018 and Lowder et al., 2021[2]. They produced the first open dataset on global food production, mapped by farm size. It covers 154 crop types across 55 countries. It not only covers the amount produced across different farm sizes, but also the types of crops and what they are used for – whether they are eaten as food, used as animal feed, or for other uses such as biofuels.[3]

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Family farms

The definition of a family farm is broad: it’s one that is operated by an individual or group of individuals, where most labor is supplied by the family.

References

  1. Lowder, S. K., Skoet, J., & Raney, T. (2016). The number, size, and distribution of farms, smallholder farms, and family farms worldwide. World Development, 87, 16-29. ↩︎

  2. Lowder, S. K., Sánchez, M. V., & Bertini, R. (2021). Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated?. World Development, 142, 105455. ↩︎

  3. Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B. (2018). How much of the world's food do smallholders produce?. Global Food Security, 17, 64-72. ↩︎