Abstract
The paper by Thomas Carlin and John Crecink has two sources of strength: (a) their commonsense notion that the definition of a small farm is multidimensional, and (b) their use of the 1975 Farm Production Expenditure Survey data. The authors show, for the first time, that low income, small farm families have an important dependence on farming and that they are more closely akin to all low income farm families than to all small farm families. I believe that the data presented by Carlin and Crecink may stimulate some interesting research projects. For example, why do low income, small farm families that report a negative net farm income appear to be superior off-farm income earners as compared to low income, small farm families reporting a positive net farm income? In short, why are failures on the farm successes off the farm? One
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