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Sociology of Agriculture and Food (SAFRIG)

Who Counts as a Farmer? Individual-Level Farmer Typologies in Taiwan Hui-Ju Kuo*, Hui-Ju Kuo,

Who counts as a “farmer” has long been taken for granted in agricultural research, policy discourse, and official statistics. However, under conditions of rapid agrarian restructuring, capitalist penetration, and rural labor diversification, farming can no longer be understood as a homogeneous occupation or a household-based category. This study seeks to reconceptualize and empirically identify contemporary farmer types in Taiwan by shifting the analytical focus from households to individuals and from static occupational labels to actual work content and employment configurations. The study pursues three interrelated research objectives. First, it asks how many rural residents are actively engaged in agricultural production and in what forms, given the coexistence of self-cultivation, hired farm labor, and agricultural service work. Second, it develops an empirically grounded typology of farmers based on individuals’ employment status and modes of agricultural engagement, rather than household-level production characteristics. Third, it examines how these farmer types differ in terms of their demographic profiles, land tenure and management patterns, marketing channels, agricultural income, labor input, and subjective social positioning. Together, these questions aim to clarify the social, economic, and livelihood diversity embedded within Taiwan’s contemporary farming populations. This study responds to critiques that macro-level agrarian categories often fail to capture the hybrid and overlapping work identities that characterize late-industrializing rural societies. By operationalizing farmer types at the individual level, this study contributes to a more fine-grained understanding of agrarian heterogeneity that complements and challenges existing household-based statistical classifications. Methodologically, this study analyzed nationally representative data from the 2019 Taiwan Rural Social and Cultural Survey, based on face-to-face interviews with 3,321 rural residents across 137 rural communities. Farmers were identified using a combination of employment status, industry classification derived from open-ended job descriptions, and respondents’ self-reported engagement in agricultural production, hired agricultural work, and agricultural service provision. Contingency tables are first used to map combinations of work status and agricultural activities, which then serve as the basis for constructing an eight-category farmer typology: full-time farmers, casual (odd-job) farmers, family-business farmers, hired farm workers and agricultural service providers, mixed farmers, part-time farmers, retired farmers, and an agricultural reserve labor force. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with post-hoc tests was subsequently employed to compare farmer types across demographic characteristics, land ownership and use, farm size, marketing channels, labor input, net agricultural income, and subjective social class perception. The preliminary results revealed several key patterns. First, fewer than 30 percent of rural residents are actively engaged in agricultural production, underscoring the extent to which “rural” no longer equates to “farming.” Second, full-time farmers remain the largest single group but coexist with substantial shares of part-time farmers, retired farmers, and hybrid types, whose agricultural engagement is secondary or fragmented. Third, the farmer types differ systematically in terms of age, farming experience, land tenure, and market orientation. Full-time farmers cultivate the largest areas, rent land more frequently, work the longest hours, and rely heavily on wholesale and intermediary market. Casual and retired farmers tend to be older, cultivate smaller plots, devote fewer labor hours, and show higher rates of self-consumption. Part-time farmers are younger on average, maintain long farming experience despite limited labor input, and are more likely to experiment with digital and direct marketing channels. Hired farm workers and agricultural service providers emerge as a numerically small but socio-economically vulnerable group, characterized by lower subjective social status and limited land access. Overall, the findings demonstrate that Taiwan’s farming population is far more internally differentiated than is visible through existing official statistics. By foregrounding individual-level work patterns and employment relations, this study provides a clearer empirical foundation for understanding contemporary farmer diversity and rethinking agricultural policy instruments that continue to assume a homogeneous “farmer” subject. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this typology for future research on agrarian change, labor precarity, and rural policy design in Taiwan and comparable contexts in East Asia.