Who .farm is genuinely for
The extension does its best work where agriculture meets the public. A holding that sells at the gate, runs a shop, delivers boxes, opens for visits or supplies restaurants has a marketing problem, not just a website, and the suffix carries part of the message on its own. The naming pattern that works is the family or holding name on the left and nothing else, so that the label stays short enough to say on the phone and print on a delivery box.
It is also a reasonable fit for the businesses around farming rather than farming itself, machinery dealers, feed and seed merchants, contractors, veterinary practices and agronomy consultancies, where the audience is farmers and the suffix signals which industry you serve. What it is not good at is anything that has to look like a national institution or a large processor. A cooperative, a certification body or a food brand sold through supermarkets will be better served by a country extension or the .com, because those buyers are checking corporate legitimacy rather than provenance.
Registry reality, and the renewal problem in this sector
IANA lists .farm's sponsoring organisation as Binky Moon, LLC, contracting through Identity Digital, delegated in December 2013 under an ordinary ICANN registry agreement. That means there is no agricultural policy layer of any kind: the registry publishes an acceptable use policy, an IDN policy and a reserved names list, and none of them impose an eligibility test. The premium and reserved sets are the only practical constraint, and the registry can revise both without notice, so the price the search returns for a specific name is the price that applies.
The failure mode we see most often on agricultural domains is not policy, it is the calendar. Sites are frequently built once by a contractor or a family member, registered on their email address, then left alone for years, and the first anyone hears of an expiry is when the shop's order page stops loading. ICANN obliges us to send two expiry notices, about a month and about a week before the date, but they only work if the address on the record is read. As your registrar we can act at the ordinary renewal price for 40 days after expiry; once the name has been deleted into redemption, restoring it costs materially more and it cannot be moved to another registrar until it has been restored.