Definition
FARMER carries three distinct legal meanings, each operative in different historical and doctrinal contexts:
1. Lessee of land. In its oldest technical legal sense, a farmer is any person who holds land under a lease — for life or for years — regardless of whether the land is actually cultivated. The term derives from the practice of paying a fixed farm (a settled rent) for the use of land. Under this usage, a lessee of even a small cottage and parcel of ground was properly called a farmer.
2. Agricultural cultivator. In common parlance and as a term of description in deeds and statutes, a farmer is one who cultivates a farm, whether as owner or tenant. This is the modern operative meaning in most agricultural, regulatory, and bankruptcy contexts.
3. Revenue farmer. One who contracts with a government to collect public revenues — taxes, customs, excise, or similar duties — typically by paying a fixed sum for the right to collect and retain the proceeds. This use is largely historical in common-law jurisdictions but remains essential for interpreting older fiscal legislation and records.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person who works the land and/or keeps livestock; anyone engaged in agriculture on a farm. More specifically, a farm owner, as distinguished from a farmworker or hired hand. Also, historically, one who takes taxes or customs duties to collect for a rate per cent.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): One who hires and cultivates a farm; a cultivator of leased ground; a tenant. One devoted to tillage of the soil; an agriculturist; a husbandman. One who takes taxes, customs, or excise duties to collect, paying a fixed annual rent for the privilege.
The common and legal meanings overlap substantially for the agricultural sense but diverge sharply on the other two. Most modern readers would not recognize the lessee sense at all, and the revenue-farmer sense — common enough in Webster's 1913 to warrant equal billing — has essentially vanished from ordinary usage. A researcher encountering "farmer" in an older deed, revenue statute, or equity proceeding must not assume the agricultural meaning without checking context.
Common Confusion
The lessee meaning and the agriculturist meaning are easily conflated in historical sources. A party described as "farmer" in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century conveyance is likely a leaseholder, not necessarily someone tilling the soil. The revenue-farmer meaning is the most frequently overlooked: "farmer of the customs" or "farmer of the excise" appears in colonial-era and English fiscal records and has nothing to do with agriculture. Conflating these meanings can produce serious misreadings of property documents, tax records, and legislative history.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Farmer of the revenues (also: tax farmer, revenue farmer): A contractor who purchases the right to collect public revenues. Common in pre-modern European and colonial fiscal administration.
Farmer-lessee: The archaic technical sense of any lessee for life or years of land, even without agricultural use.
Farmer (agriculturist): The modern dominant meaning — one who cultivates land, whether as owner or tenant.
Why It Matters in Research
The three-way ambiguity in this term creates real research hazards across several parts of the Law Mind corpus.
In property and conveyancing records, the lessee meaning controlled well into the nineteenth century. A deed or equity pleading describing a party as "farmer of Blackacre" is characterizing a tenancy relationship, not an occupation. Researchers reading such documents through a modern lens risk misidentifying the party's legal status entirely.
In fiscal and revenue law materials — colonial statutes, customs records, exchequer proceedings — "farmer" almost certainly carries the revenue-collection meaning. The farming of revenues was a standard governmental financing mechanism, and the legal relationships it created (assignment, sub-farming, liability for shortfalls) were extensively litigated. These materials are poorly indexed under modern agricultural law concepts.
In bankruptcy and agricultural relief statutes (including twentieth-century federal legislation), "farmer" is a defined term of art with specific income and acreage thresholds that determine eligibility. The statutory definition does not simply import the common-law agriculturist meaning. Researchers working with such statutes must locate the operative statutory definition rather than relying on dictionary meanings.
Jurisdictional variation is also significant for regulatory purposes: "farmer" defined in one state's agricultural lien statute may differ from the definition in a neighboring state's statute or in federal farm program regulations.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's are in close agreement, presenting all three meanings in essentially identical order and language, drawing on Cunningham and Cowell as common authorities for the lessee sense. The consistency across sources reflects a stable received understanding rather than any doctrinal dispute.
What the historical dictionaries do not adequately convey is the relative weight of these meanings across time. By the mid-nineteenth century the revenue-farmer sense was already receding from American legal usage even as it remained alive in English fiscal law. The lessee sense persisted longer in formal drafting but was becoming archaic in American practice. The historical entries treat all three meanings as equally current, which misleads researchers trying to assess which meaning governed at a particular time and place.
Bouvier's adds a useful note that in "common parlance, and as a term of description in a deed, farmer means one who cultivates a farm, whether he owns it or not" — acknowledging that by his era the agriculturist sense had become dominant in ordinary legal drafting even if the technical lessee sense survived in strict legal usage.
None of the historical sources address the statutory definition problem that becomes central in twentieth-century agricultural and bankruptcy law. That gap must be filled by consulting the applicable statutory text directly.
Jurisdictional Note
In federal bankruptcy law, "farmer" is a defined statutory term with specific eligibility thresholds; the definition has been amended over time and controls access to specialized reorganization provisions. State agricultural lien and exemption statutes frequently contain their own definitions that may or may not align with federal usage. Researchers should not assume definitional consistency across jurisdictions or between common-law and statutory contexts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Agricultural Law (for the modern regulatory and statutory definition landscape); Revenue Farming (for the historical tax-collection sense and its legal relationships); Leasehold Estates (for the lessee-farmer usage in property law).