Farm women and men's decsions regarding working on or off farm

Abstract

Farms in New Zealand and Australia demonstrate how farm men and women are working away from the farm in ways that parallel urban families with multiple income earners and dual career couples. The rural literature recognises this development by reporting levels of off-farm work and by developing the concept of pluriactivity, as it arose from its European setting and has been applied to studies of rural society in Australasia. This article seeks to make a modest contribution to our understanding of pluriactivity by specifying precisely the reasons given by farm men and women in the South Island, New Zealand, for working on or off farm. The results reported here support those perspectives which emphasise the non-economic factors involved in decisions made about working on or off the farm and deepens our understanding of pluriactivity.