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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 acknowl
by 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 agoI 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.