From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Farm \Farm\, n. [OE. ferme rent, lease, F. ferme, LL. firma, fr.
L. firmus firm, fast, firmare to make firm or fast. See
Firm, a. & n.]
1. The rent of land, -- originally paid by reservation of
part of its products. [Obs.]
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2. The term or tenure of a lease of land for cultivation; a
leasehold. [Obs.]
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It is great willfulness in landlords to make any
longer farms to their tenants. --Spenser.
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3. The land held under lease and by payment of rent for the
purpose of cultivation.
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4. Any tract of land devoted to agricultural purposes, under
the management of a tenant or the owner.
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Note: In English the ideas of a lease, a term, and a rent,
continue to be in a great degree inseparable, even from
the popular meaning of a farm, as they are entirely so
from the legal sense. --Burrill.
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5. A district of country leased (or farmed) out for the
collection of the revenues of government.
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The province was devided into twelve farms. --Burke.
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6. (O. Eng. Law) A lease of the imposts on particular goods;
as, the sugar farm, the silk farm.
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Whereas G. H. held the farm of sugars upon a rent of
10,000 marks per annum. --State Trials
(1196).
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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Farm \Farm\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Farmed; p. pr. & vb. n.
Farming.]
1. To lease or let for an equivalent, as land for a rent; to
yield the use of to proceeds.
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We are enforced to farm our royal realm. --Shak.
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2. To give up to another, as an estate, a business, the
revenue, etc., on condition of receiving in return a
percentage of what it yields; as, to farm the taxes.
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To farm their subjects and their duties toward
these. --Burke.
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3. To take at a certain rent or rate.
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4. To devote (land) to agriculture; to cultivate, as land; to
till, as a farm.
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To farm let, To let to farm, to lease on rent.
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From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Farm \Farm\, v. i.
To engage in the business of tilling the soil; to labor as a
farmer.
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From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
farm
n 1: workplace consisting of farm buildings and cultivated land
as a unit; "it takes several people to work the farm"
v 1: be a farmer; work as a farmer; "My son is farming in
California"
2: collect fees or profits
3: cultivate by growing, often involving improvements by means
of agricultural techniques; "The Bordeaux region produces
great red wines"; "They produce good ham in Parma"; "We grow
wheat here"; "We raise hogs here" [syn: grow, raise,
farm, produce]
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008) [foldoc]:
processor farm
farm
<computer, parallel> A parallel processor where tasks are
distributed, or "farmed out", by one "farmer" processor to
several "worker" processors, and results are sent back to the
farmer. This arrangement is suitable for applications which
can be partitioned into many separate, independent tasks, the
canonical examples being ray tracing and the {Mandelbrot
set}. In order to be efficient, the extra time spent on
communications must be small compared to the time spent
processing each task.
(2001-05-28)
From Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) [jargon]:
farm
n.
A group of machines, especially a large group of near-identical
machines running load-balancing software, dedicated to a single task.
Historically the term server farm, used especially for a group of web
servers, seems to have been coined by analogy with earlier disk farm
in the early 1990s; generalization began with render farm for a group
of machines dedicated to rendering computer animations (this term
appears to have been popularized by publicity about the pioneering
"Linux render farm" used to produce the movie Titanic). By 2001 other
combinations such as "compile farm" and "compute farm" were
increasingly common, and arguably borderline techspeak. More jargon
uses seem likely to arise (and be absorbed into techspeak over time)
as new uses are discovered for networked machine clusters. Compare
link farm.