Present or Absent Farm Heads? A Contemporary Reading of Family Farming in Greece

Abstract

AbstractThe paradoxical picture of Greek agriculture according to which small family farms with fragmented agricultural land remain in the productive system, as well as the increasing feminisation of agriculture and the ageing of farm heads is currently under consideration. Drawing on field research in a rural area of northern Greece, we focus on the official farm heads' cohort and investigate aspects of their involvement in farming, dwelling choices and farmland ownership. The basic aim is to convey an authentic picture of the reality of family farming in modern Greece that often lies concealed behind official figures and myths. In so doing both a quantitative analysis (two‐step cluster analysis) of 1,295 farm heads and interview narratives were used. The fiction created in rural Greece and the heterogeneity of farm heads (absent or present from the village or the farm, or both) is the result of cross‐cutting issues: administrative and policy framework, the proliferation of rural development programmes, the way that ownership of the farmland is conflated with headship of the farm, the spatial mobility of the rural population, multiple dwelling‐places and the struggle of the family farm to preserve its agricultural identity and survive through times of rural restructuring and socioeconomic instability.