Challenging the Attitude: Family-farm succession and rural community sustainability

Family-farm succession has been and remains a highly gendered process in Australia and other Western nations such that sons are predominately favoured as successors to family farms while daughters are expected to seek lives... [ view full abstract ]

Family-farm succession has been and remains a highly gendered process in Australia and other Western nations such that sons are predominately favoured as successors to family farms while daughters are expected to seek lives off their childhood family farms and, hence, to reside elsewhere. Even after Australia’s 1984 Anti-discrimination Act to allow women equal career and work opportunities, the patriarchal practices of patrilineal inheritance and succession remain apparent in the majority of Australian farming families (Bennett 2014). However, rural farming communities appear to be at tipping point in terms of retaining or attracting sufficient numbers of young people to replace older retiring members of rural communities. My current PhD research finds the loss of rural population is partly due to the patriarchal attitudes of farm parents and in particular to the male farm owners who position themselves as heads of farm households and who hold the dominant decision-making position in their families. I assert that farming families and their communities are faced with a significant 'attitudinal' tipping point which, unless acted on, will see further declines in rural farming populations through the alienation of non-successor farm children, the majority of whom are daughters. This attitudinal tipping point is endogenous to rural communities seeking to remain sustainable, and farm owners themselves must and can institute changes to their patriarchal attitudes to sustain their rural communities. Rather than avoiding the inherent feminist issue facing farm families, I assert that policy-makers along with farming community members ought now to confront the issue if rural community sustainability is to remain a viable goal.

Key words: farm succession, patriarchy, equal opportunity, rural community sustainability