This paper examines what, precisely, is meant by a 'farm' and considers various attributes of farms relevant to an assessment of the structure of European agriculture. A measure of average farm size is proposed to cope with the uncertain count of the population of farms. The issue of tenure may...

The holding of a seminar on the future for ‘small farms’ requires us to consider what is meant by a ‘small farm’. This is not as straightforward as might be imagined. It presupposes an unambiguous definition of what constitutes ‘a farm’ and a means of distinguishing those farms which...

This paper examines what, precisely, is meant by a 'farm', the criteria for the inclusion of individual farms in a statistical register and the resulting enumerations and average sizes of farms in published statistics. Alternative measures of farm size are examined and a relatively novel measure...