A farmhand carries out the daily physical tasks of agriculture, including feeding animals, repairing fences, lifting crops, cleaning buildings, and operating machinery. Unlike the farmer or landowner, the farmhand often appears in literature as a wage labourer with limited control over land or profit. In poetry, this figure can express strength, skill, fatigue, poverty, camaraderie, and seasonal insecurity. The farmhand brings attention to the human bodies and overlooked work behind pastoral beauty and agricultural abundance.

A farmhand is a hired agricultural labourer rather than necessarily the owner or manager of a farm. The term directs attention towards the physical work behind rural abundance: lifting, feeding, cleaning, repairing, harvesting, and handling animals. In poetry, farmhands may embody skill and endurance but also low wages, insecurity, and class inequality. Related terms include labourer, hired hand, seasonal worker, farmer, landowner, harvest crew, ploughman, and shepherd.