farms

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of farm.

   Dairy farms across the region adopted automated milking systems.

   Heavy rain flooded the low-lying farms near the river.

   Note

   A regular plural that covers every countable use of farm at once: holdings that grow crops or raise livestock, tracts of land worked on lease, and industrial sites made up of many similar structures, often named in compounds. It also serves the computing use, where farms are groups of coordinated servers. The obsolete meanings, food and a feast, play no part in the modern plural.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of farm.

   My neighbor farms a small orchard on the hillside behind his house.

   The cooperative farms several thousand acres under a shared management plan.

   Note

   The verb works both with and without an object, and the -s form shows the split clearly. She farms, on its own, means she works the land. She farms the valley or farms barley names the land or the crop. With out, it becomes a business verb: an owner farms out an estate or its revenue in return for a share of what it yields. Older uses for letting land at a rent are obsolete.

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