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A situation in which farmers engage in some other regular occupation from which they derive income to enhance their standard of living and/or underwrite their farming activities (Gasson, 1988). This livelihood strategy was instigated by falling real incomes amongst farmers in advanced industrial countries in the 1970s. Since then there has been a dramatic rise in the incidence of part-time farming in western Europe, North America and Australasia (Cavazzani and Fuller, 1982). It takes many forms and involves the diversification of several, sometimes overlapping, dimensions of farm organization (see also farming, types of). These include the use of farm land, buildings and other capital assets for other business ventures; multiple job-holding; multiple sources of income; and new divisions of labour within farming households (MacKinnon, et al., 1991). Such activities have been promoted by farm \'diversification\' policies in many countries and have become so commonplace that the more comprehensive term \'pluriactivity\' is now widely used to describe them (Marsden, 1990; Evans and Ilbery, 1993). (SW)
References Cavazzani, A. and Fuller, A. 1982: International perspectives on part-time farming: a review. GeoJournal, 6/4: 383-9. Evans, N. and Ilbery, B. 1993: The pluriactivity, part-time farming, and farm diversification debate. Environment and Planning A 25: 945-59. Gasson, R. 1988: The economics of part-time farming. London: Longman. MacKinnon, N., Bryden, J., Bell, C., Fuller, A. and Spearman, M. 1991: Pluriactivity, structural change and farm household vulnerability in Western Europe. Sociologia Ruralis 31: 58-71. Marsden, T. 1990. Towards a political economy of pluriactivity. Journal of Rural Studies 6: 375-82. |
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