In agriculture, agribusiness is a generic term that refers to the various businesses involved in food production, including farming, seed supply, agrichemicals, farm machinery, wholesale and distribution, processing, marketing, and retail sales. The term has two distinctly different connotations depending on context.
Within the agriculture industry, agribusiness is widely used simply as the convenient contraction of agriculture and business, referring to the range of activities and disciplines encompassed by modern food production. There are academic degrees in and departments of agribusiness, agribusiness trade associations, agribusiness publications, and so forth, worldwide. Here, the term is only descriptive.
Among critics of large-scale, industrialized, vertically-integrated food production, the term agribusiness is used as a negative, synonymous with corporate farming. As such, it is often contrasted with family farm. Some negative connotation is also derived from the negative associations of "business" and "corporation" from critics of capitalism or corporate excess.
