Farm
In the United States, livestock may be raised on rangeland and finished in feedlots, and the mechanization of crop production has brought about a great decrease in the number of agricultural workers needed.
In Australia, some farms are very large because the land is unable to support a high stocking density of livestock because of climatic conditions.
In less developed countries, small farms are the norm, and the majority of rural residents are subsistence farmers, feeding their families and selling any surplus products in the local market.
It may have started about 12,000 years ago with the domestication of livestock in the Fertile Crescent in western Asia, soon to be followed by the cultivation of crops.
[11] A farm may operate under a monoculture system or with a variety of cereal or arable crops, which may be separate from or combined with raising livestock.
Many other terms are used to describe farms to denote their methods of production, as in collective, corporate, intensive, organic or vertical.
Dairy farming is a class of agriculture, where female cattle, goats, or other mammals are raised for their milk, which may be either processed on-site or transported to a dairy for processing and eventual retail sale There are many breeds of cattle that can be milked some of the best producing ones include Holstein, Norwegian Red, Kostroma, Brown Swiss, and more.
In the United States, these dairies are usually local companies, while in the southern hemisphere facilities may be run by very large nationwide or trans-national corporations (such as Fonterra).
Farm control and ownership have traditionally been a key indicator of status and power, especially in Medieval European agrarian societies.
Medieval feudalism was essentially a system that centralized control of farmland, control of farm labor, and political power, while the early American democracy, in which land ownership was a prerequisite for voting rights, was built on relatively easy paths to individual farm ownership.
Agribusiness is the industry, enterprises, and the field of study[15] of value chains in agriculture[16] and in the bio-economy,[17] in which case it is also called bio-business[18][19] or bio-enterprise.
The primary goal of agribusiness is to maximize profit while satisfying the needs of consumers for products related to natural resources.
Agribusinesses comprise farms, food and fiber processing, forestry, fisheries, biotechnology and biofuel enterprises and their input suppliers.
They are able to expand and make profits, improve the productivity of land, labor, and capital, and keep their costs down to ensure market price competitiveness.
It encompasses a broader spectrum through the agribusiness system which includes input supplies, value-addition, marketing, entrepreneurship, microfinancing, and agricultural extension.
[27] In the UK, farm as an agricultural unit, always denotes the area of pasture and other fields together with its farmhouse, farmyard and outbuildings.
Conversely, a small farm surrounding the owner's dwelling is called a smallholding and is generally focused on self-sufficiency with only the surplus being sold.
In Europe, traditional family farms are giving way to larger production units where industrial agriculture and mechanization brings large crop yields.
Depending on climate-related areas primarily farming is the raising and breeding of grazing livestock, such as cattle, sheep, ostriches, horses or goats.
Predominantly domestic animals are raised for their meat, milk, skin, leather or fiber wool).
Farm equipment has evolved over the centuries from simple hand tools such as the hoe, through ox- or horse-drawn equipment such as the plough and harrow, to the modern highly technical machinery such as the tractor, baler and combine harvester replacing what was a highly labour-intensive occupation before the Industrial Revolution.
In addition on a smaller scale Farmbot[40] and the RepRap open source 3D printer community has begun to make open-source farm tools available of increasing levels of sophistication.
