marginal farmer

plural marginal farmers

1. A farmer with a bare subsistence level of income from their own land, sometimes working as an agricultural laborer.

   In India, the percentage of marginal farmers among all farmers is nearly 70%.

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see marginal, farmer.

   First, in equilibrium the marginal (last) farmer finds that the cost of the last unit of fertilizer (i.e. the market price) is just equal to its benefit.

   2007, Liam Brunt, “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”, in The Economic History Review, volume 60, number 2, Wiley Online Library, →DOI, →ISSN, page 357

   2 more examples

   (“Marginal” in an economic sense means “additional” or “incremental,” but has no normative or pejorative connotation.) At that point, adding more workers to a unit of farmland leads to less and less additional output, because the land cannot accommodate so many workers. […] No marginal product, or even a negative marginal product, results from the marginal farmer.

   2015, Raj Bhala, Dictionary of International Trade Law, 3rd Edition (2015), →ISBN

   Farmers maximise expected profit under each technology and government maximises welfare. This determines when the marginal farmer chooses legal GM seed rather than illegal GM seed or conventional seed.

   2015, Anne Jillian Arnold, A game-theoretic approach to modelling crop royalties. (thesis), University of Adelaide, page 62