Prior research indicates not only that family businesses have fewer management controls in place and are more likely to have non-economic goals for their firm but also that female-controlled businesses tend to underperform compared to male-controlled businesses. In this article, we analyze the performance effects of management controls and goals for the business across both male and female-controlled farm and rural family businesses. The results suggest that female-controlled farm and rural family businesses do not underperform their male counterparts in terms of objective or subjective assessments of performance. This is an important finding, given the mixed results across the family business literature regarding the impacts of gender on performance. Our results do indicate, however, that management controls and strategies and goals for the firm influence objective and subjective performance differently across male and female-controlled farm and rural family businesses.