Purpose-It is difficult to develop an overall picture of the practice of management accounting in farms and farm enterprises because little research has been published on the topic, and these studies are mostly discrete and unconnected to the others. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the available research, develop an explanatory framework for management accounting practices in farming entities and identify some major avenues for future research on the topic. Design/methodology/approach-This paper employs systematic literature review methods. After an extensive database search and an examination of references/citations, 41 empirical 1 Acknowledgements: This paper is based on the second author's master's thesis submitted at the University of Siegen. A previous version of this paper has been presented at the 15 th Annual Conference for Management Accounting Research (ACMAR) in Vallendar, Germany. The authors would like to thank the ACMAR participants and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments which have helped to improve the paper.