The purpose of this article is to identify the characteristic elements of Brazilian agricultural structure and demonstrate the marked inequality present in family farming in the country. For this, research on the bibliography was held on the subject in recent years, as well as a survey of official statistics related to the productive sector profile and the provision of rural credit. Overall, the study shows that there is a remarkable economic and political dualism between family farmers and commercial farmers/agribusiness in constant competition for public funds in Brazil, leading to adoption of generalizing visions guided on statistical averages of census numbers that tend to shift the focus of the prevailing glaring inequalities in the national field. In relation to family farming, despite improvements in the distribution of monetary income recorded in the twenty-first century approaches, there is a significant heterogeneity and productive inequality within the segment, dominated by a vast contingent of poor or extremely poor farmers. On the basis of this framework, often overlooked in analyses that seek to emphasize the virtues of the category of aggregate from the census data, there is a historical heritage of social differentiation, which maintains and worsens over time, due, among other factors, to the recent privileging of the sectors most capitalized segment of the distribution of rural Pronaf credit.