Concept
Farming or tax-farming is a technique of financial management in which the management of a variable revenue stream is assigned by legal contract to a third party and the holder of the revenue stream receives fixed periodic rents from the contractor. It is most commonly used in public finance, where governments (the lessors) lease or assign the right to collect and retain the whole of the tax revenue to a private financier (the farmer), who is charged with paying fixed sums (sometimes called "rents", but with a different meaning from the common modern term) into the treasury. Farming in this sense has nothing to do with agriculture, other than in a metaphorical sense. There are two possible origins for farm. Some sources derive "farm" with its French version ferme, most notably used in the context of the Fermiers Generaux, from the mediaeval Latin firma, meaning "a fixed agreement, contract", ultimately from the classical Latin adjective firmus, firma, firmum, meaning "firm, strong, stout, steadfast, immoveable, sure, to be relied upon". The modern agricultural sense of the word stems from the same origin, in that a medieval land-"holder" (none "owned" land but the king himself under his allodial title) under feudal land tenure might let it (i.e. lease it out) under a contract as a going concern (not as a sub-infeudated fee), that is to say as a unit producing a revenue stream, together with its workers, livestock and deadstock (i.e. implements), for exploitation by a tenant who was licensed by the contract, or firma, to keep all the revenue he could extract from the holding in exchange for fixed rents. Thus the rights to the revenue stream produced by the land had been farmed by the lessor (therefore strictly perhaps the "farmor") and the tenant became the "holder of the farm", or to coin a word, "farmee". Because this was the form of the farming transaction most known to popular society, the word "farmer" became synonymous with a tenant of an agricultural holding.