The Farm as a Family Business: A Review

Although the great majority of UK farms are run as family businesses, the family dimension of these businesses is frequently neglected. There are nevertheless important inferences to be drawn from studying the farm family, its forms and functions, and the way that the family and the business interact. This calls for a multidisciplinary approach and the review attempts to draw together insights from industrial economics, social anthropology, history and rural sociology as they apply to the farm family business. It then relates these insights to considerations of the family development cycle, processes of inheritance and succession, roles of farmers' wives and multiple‐job farming families. The literature review points to opposing tendencies within the population of farm businesses. Family forms of organisation and relationships may have become less relevant to farming at the lower end of the size scale but more relevant to the conduct of a successful large farm business.