Being a farmer’s child : the silent making of a farmer

Sammanfattning: As many farms in the European Union and within Sweden are family farms, farm inheritance becomes a relevant topic. Many children of farmers grow up in the agrarian world and stand to one day be farmers themselves. The aim of the thesis is to understand how children of farmers in Sweden are socialized into the role of farmers and how their gender impacts both their chance at being a successor and how they perceive the idea of succession. This thesis seeks to understand how the upbringing of children on farms involve gender-specific socialization into the role of farmer and how the gender of the children impacts their view of their ability to take over the operations. To answer these questions, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 8 participants. The participants had grown up in a family farm context and had reflected upon a possibility to inherit the farm. The analysis of the interviews showed that parents do not wish to pressure their child into becoming a farmer and adopts a silent policy regarding succession talk. The silent policy does not always result in less pressure. Young women have interacted with machinery in their childhood but still struggle to confidently operate and care for them, thus making them prone to desire a partner with whom they could share the workload with. Men, on the other hand, desire partnership with non-relationship related entities, such as neighbors or institutions. This research is of value when trying to understand the early stages of generation shift processes and how different genders perceive the opportunity to inherit a family farm.