Doctoral thesis on familiar agriculture in Brazil

This article presents collected data from doctoral thesis about familiar agriculture defended at Brazilian graduate programs recognized from 2000 to 2009. The bank of thesis and dissertations of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel was used to collect data. The corpus was composed of 153 doctoral theses whose main focus was on familiar agriculture. The results indicated that: a) the number of doctoral dissertations about familiar agriculture increased after 2000, totaling 33 doctoral theses in 2009; b) the universities where the doctoral defenses occurred were mainly located in the Southern and Southeast regions of Brazil; c) 122 theses discussed rural development, 21 discussed rural production and the remaining ones discussed other specific topics; d) among the 73 dissertations that discussed rural development, 16 were related to education, 13 to public policies, 10 to management, 7 to settlement, 7 to rural associativism, 6 were devoted to specific interested parties, 6 discussed work, 5 pluriactivity, and 3 legislation. It may be concluded that the mapping enabled the collection of studies within the period analyzed and it showed evidence that these approaches are influenced by environment and context, since the states with a greater number of theses on familiar agriculture are those that have more economically structured and developed agricultural activities.