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> Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor Huh, this statement is so weird to me that it was a "lightbulb moment" about what words mean to different

by floor2 4y ago

> Also farmers are disproportionately immigrant labor Huh, this statement is so weird to me that it was a "lightbulb moment" about what words mean to different people online. I wonder how much misunderstanding this causes. I'm guessing your background is urban and coastal? I'd love it if you'd share, I'm genuinely curious. I would never use the word "farmer" if I was talking about an immigrant laborer picking fruit or whatever. I'd call them migrant laborers or pickers or farm workers. In the standard dialect of people in the 90% of America designated "flyover country", they'd would use the word "farmer" to mean the people who own and operate farms. Generally a middle-class, small-business-owner type person. Likely educated in some mixture of agriculture, business, finance, real estate. They're highly financially savvy, as they have to manage selling futures vs taking the spot price for their crops balanced against storage costs, land rental agreements, machinery leases or repairs, tax and crop insurance complexities, not to mention the science of how to optimize yield on their specific land. Calling the laborers "farmers" is like calling an uber driver a tech worker, at least in the dialect of English I speak.

runnerup 4y ago
I’m from the northern midwest (Michigan/Ohio) and Texas. We call people who do the farming “farmers” and the people who own the farms “farm owners”. We acknowledge that a lot of even the white families who live on the farm that they farm no longer own their farms. They’re still “farmers” to us even though they don’t own their farmland. In Texas we also have “Ranch Owner” vs. “Ranchero”. One of them has bullshit stuck on the outside of their boots, the other has the bullshit inside their boots. My wife has some Indian-American friends who invest in farmland and laugh at the idea that they have “white sharecroppers”. It would be weird to call them farmers, but not call their “white sharecroppers” farmers.
- floor2 4y ago
  I think your statement "We call people who do the farming 'farmers'" is accurate to my usage as well, perhaps with then some nuance to what work is "farming". I didn't mean to imply that land ownership was central. But maybe "operating the business of a farm" is farming/being a farmer, whereas "doing labor on a farm" is not. For instance, if person A owns 100 acres of farm land, person B rents that land and makes the decisions about what to plant, when to plant, when to harvest, how to manage the transportation and sale of the product, etc and person C is hired by B to do some work on that farm, I'd probably only call person B a farmer.

by floor2 4y ago

runnerup 4y ago

I’m from the northern midwest (Michigan/Ohio) and Texas. We call people who do the farming “farmers” and the people who own the farms “farm owners”. We acknowledge that a lot of even the white families who live on the farm that they farm no longer own their farms. They’re still “farmers” to us even though they don’t own their farmland. In Texas we also have “Ranch Owner” vs. “Ranchero”. One of them has bullshit stuck on the outside of their boots, the other has the bullshit inside their boots. My wife has some Indian-American friends who invest in farmland and laugh at the idea that they have “white sharecroppers”. It would be weird to call them farmers, but not call their “white sharecroppers” farmers.

floor2 4y ago
I think your statement "We call people who do the farming 'farmers'" is accurate to my usage as well, perhaps with then some nuance to what work is "farming". I didn't mean to imply that land ownership was central. But maybe "operating the business of a farm" is farming/being a farmer, whereas "doing labor on a farm" is not. For instance, if person A owns 100 acres of farm land, person B rents that land and makes the decisions about what to plant, when to plant, when to harvest, how to manage the transportation and sale of the product, etc and person C is hired by B to do some work on that farm, I'd probably only call person B a farmer.