Other forms: farmers
A farmer is the person who runs a farm: sowing and cutting the crops, milking the cows, getting the sheep in before dark. Mud on the boots, a tractor in the yard, awake before it is light.
The word covers a family with forty acres and a company managing forty thousand, and it takes a word in front to say which kind: dairy farmer, sheep farmer, arable farmer, fish farmer. A farmer is the one in charge, whether they own the land or rent it, and the people who work for them are farmhands or farm workers. Farming is both the activity and the industry, and the verb farm goes with land and animals, though farm out a job means hand it to someone else. The farmer of rhymes and picture books, the one who wants a wife, is a stock figure of the countryside, which is why the word feels warmer than agricultural producer.
1nounfarmerA person who owns or runs a farm, growing crops or raising animals.
“The farmer was out at five to check on the lambs.”
synonyms: grower, smallholder
farmer is a job.
A farmer was once a tax collector. Medieval Latin firmarius meant the man who had bought the right to collect what was owed on a piece of land, and a farm was the fixed rent rather than the field. Middle English fermour still meant a steward, bailiff or collector, and only later did the word slide from the man who paid the rent to the man who works the ground.
Medieval Latin
firmarius — one to whom land is rented, a collector of taxes, deputy
Old French
fermier — a farmer, a lessee, husbandman, bailliff
Middle English
fermour — a steward, bailliff, collector of taxes
English, today
farmer
From Middle English fermour (“a steward, bailliff, collector of taxes”), from Old French fermier (“a farmer, a lessee, husbandman, bailliff”), from Medieval Latin firmarius (“one to whom land is rented, a collector of taxes, deputy”), from firma; equivalent to farm + -er. Compare Old English feormere (“a purveyor of a guild, a supplier of food, a grocer, farmer”). More at farm.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA