I'm mulling over where to go with our site domain/subdomain-wise.

The background is that our main site has been around about 10 years on the main domain and does quite well for what we want from it. Three years ago I added an ecom shopify site on a subdomain to see if it would fly. Well, it flew, and it's now the backbone of the business. There's a simple 'shop' link from the main domain side of things to the shop site, but the main domain really remains dedicated to the original and now smaller side of the business.

To frame it a bit, think of it in terms of us being farmers - the main domain is about the nitty gritty farming side of the business and the subdomain is the pretty farm products retail side of the business. The future is definitely in the retail side of the business, but the original site is still relevant, and in fact supports the retail side in establishing our 'authenticity'.

In an ideal world, I would have seen the future and integrated the two parts of the business prettily on the main domain right from the start, but here we are.

So now's the time to get it tidied up. I want to bring the retail site to prominence and integrate the farming site, without damaging the rankings for the retail site (the farming site rankings are good, but not moneymakers as such, so they'll be the sacrificial lamb if one is needed).

It seems the easiest thing to do in that case would be to move the farming page content (there's only about 10 of them) onto new pages in the retail site and put a permanent redirect from the main domain to the subdomain.

Is there any disadvantage to that though? Does a subdomain have less mojo somehow than a domain? If so, would it be worth some short term pain to move the retail site (150 or so pages) onto the main domain?

What would you do if it were yours?