<p>The “small farm” is regarded by numerous agrifood scholars and practitioners alike as an antidote to everything unjust and deleterious about modern food and agricultural systems, central to agroecological transitions, sustainable food futures, land and social justice, and food sovereignty. Despite its prominence in movement and academic discourse and debates on these subjects, however, this key character is textured with considerable murkiness given the wide and conflicting array of farm sizes, scales, practices, and socioecological relations of production it is mobilized to represent. The goal of this paper, then, is threefold: to articulate and analyze how the term “small farm” is defined (or not), deployed, and contextualized across a sample of recent articles in major agrifood and agrarian studies journals, to discuss the implications of its inconsistent usage, and to offer reflections for improved clarity. I find that “small farm” is rarely defined, when it is defined a justification is poor or lacking, and its purported qualities and characteristics are myriad and contradictory. As both chaotic and inconsistent, the term suffers from far less empirical and theoretical utility than its high mobility otherwise suggests, problematizing its centrality in normative debates about agrifood transformations. While it is not the goal of the current paper to resolve whether “small is good”, I engage that debate closely when calling for greater definitional specificity and consideration of size and scale as relative and relational, ideas that, I hope, suggest discursive and conceptual paths out of this morass.</p>