While driving on a secondary road a few weeks ago, Claire noticed a sign indicating we had just passed the entrance to a plantation. We got to talking and neither of us knew the difference between a plantation and a “large farm.”
Well, after some extensive research, turns out the difference is “not much.” Or, maybe, “none.”
I started with the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Plantation — (1) a usually large group of plants and especially trees under cultivation; (2) a: a place that is planted or under cultivation; b: an agricultural estate usually worked by resident labor
Farm — (1) a tract of land devoted to agricultural purposes; (2) a plot of land devoted to the raising of animals and especially domestic livestock
So it seems that according to the dictionary, they are pretty much the same thing.
When I was growing up in Oklahoma, I don’t remember seeing plantations, but we had farms and ranches. Ranches produced or raised livestock. They might raise some hay to feed the livestock, but their livelihood was livestock. Farms raised crops, and sometimes they diversified into livestock as well. Where I lived, farmers might occasionally refer to themselves as ranchers, but ranchers never referred to themselves as farmers.
So I’m thinking this plantation/farm terminology is possibly a regional thing.
I think there may be more than one way to classify these differences — I used to think that a plantation specialized in just one crop, like rice, tobacco, cotton, rubber, etc. I know that in Central America they have coffee plantations, in Cuba there are sugar plantations and I’ve seen pineapple plantations in Hawaii. Farms usually plant and harvest more than one main crop.
Cotton was grown on plantations in the south, but where I grew up, cotton was “farmed.” But I’ve never heard of a “sugar farm,” it’s always a sugar plantation.
Thinking of the movies I’ve seen, it seems that the people that worked on plantations usually lived there — farms are generally kind of a one family sort of operation and usually farm workers, other than the family, don’t live there.
Another view I took away from the movies was that a farm was family run and they hired help as they needed it and paid that help a fair wage. Plantations were often run with slave labor. Obviously the Civil War ended that practice.
So anyhow, I don’t know the difference — today, it’s probably more terminology or one’s perception of the term being used… kind of like a porch and a veranda. They’re both pretty much the same, but if you’ve got a porch, you sit on it and drink a beer or iced tea — if you’ve got a veranda, you sip mint juleps….
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