[deleted]
Farmers always worked from home
31–40 of 180 posts
Re: Farmers always worked from home
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them. IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance (as does owning most low margin businesses) relative to most office jobs but... To s…
Preindustrial farming involved a lot of downtime outside of the tropics. Essentially a few weeks a year involved 14+ hour days, but there simply wasn’t that much to do the rest of the year. It’s a common misconception that summer breaks where for farmers, but historically rurual areas actually had school in summer and winter with breaks in the spring and fall simply because that’s when there was a lot of work to get…
Do you have any additional information or sources on the subject. Not that I don't believe you, but I grew up in a post-industrial small farming community and 12 hour days were the norm most of the year. If the crops didnt need attention, there was always a long list of other tasks, digging wells, repairing equipment, infrastructure improvement. It would be interesting to see what changed.
Re: Farmers always worked from home
#33This article is ridiculous. I’m a farmer and clearly I have time to surf the internet, and separating work from life is absolutely something I do - and my fathers before me. Grandma would’ve never put up with shop talk at the dinner table.
A farmer on Hacker News? Please tell me more.
They must be. Remember the farmers "hacking" their tractors with Ukrainian firmware, so they can fix their own John Deer machines?
Re: Farmers always worked from home
#34This article is ridiculous. I’m a farmer and clearly I have time to surf the internet, and separating work from life is absolutely something I do - and my fathers before me. Grandma would’ve never put up with shop talk at the dinner table.
A farmer on Hacker News? Please tell me more.
I'm sure you didn't mean to cause offense, but this comment is so incredibly frustrating and highlights the incredible ignorance and stereotyping of rural America that's still common.
My reaction to this comment was to shudder the same way as if someone had said "A black person on hacker news? Please tell me more"
Modern farmers are polyglot technologists. Hybrid GMO seeds are selected to optimize yield in their specific soil and weather conditions. Tractors are largely self-driving along with a host of technology to rival a race car and harvesters give live feedback on the quality and quantity of grain so that farmers can make decisions about what to do with the grain- sell immediately, store, or take to a specialized storage facility to dry. Crops are rotated seasonally to minimize pests and optimize soil quality, sometimes on complex multi-year patterns of cover crops, cash crops, spring harvests, etc. Underground "tiling" is installed to speed the flow of water away from low-lying sections of fields to maintain consistent soil moisture across fields on rolling hills. And the futures, options, insurance and debt financing decisions to maintain stable income in the face of unpredictable weather and commodity prices rivals what any investment banker in Manhattan is doing. And that's just for commodity grain producers, meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables have their own unique uses of cutting edge science and technology.
A group of farmers in Iowa sitting at a conference about managing soil nitrogen are likely leveraging far more real science and tech than a group of web developers in the bay discussing the latest updates to React.
Re: Farmers always worked from home
#35This article is ridiculous. I’m a farmer and clearly I have time to surf the internet, and separating work from life is absolutely something I do - and my fathers before me. Grandma would’ve never put up with shop talk at the dinner table.
A farmer on Hacker News? Please tell me more.
There are many of us.
Re: Farmers always worked from home
#36Historically speaking farming has been a very up and down business and not a good way to make a living.
In the US we have this idea that there was a golden age of farming, but the cycles of boom and bust and etc have been all over the map, often short and unpredictable. Even the historical homestead type plots were potentially unsustainable at the time they were given away.
Not everyone is cut out to run their own business and farming is a pretty tough one at that ...
Re: Farmers always worked from home
#37> In the 1800s, 90 percent of the US population lived on a farm, rocking their WFH setups. How did they all survive without mental breakdowns and Harvard Business Review articles praising strict Work-Life Balance? They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plent…
If the farming life was so wonderous, people wouldn't have fled to the cities for new and better opportunities.
At least in Canada, farming in 1800s was a miserable and hard life. I don't think work-life balance came to mind for the settlers, more survive or perish.
edit: After posting I'm thinking of a couple of accounts of what farm life was like on Manitoulin island from back then. I can't get them out of my head so I'll write them here.
The first is the story of a farmer who one day finds that some of his sheep have been killed by a black bear. Now he has do something about it because the bear will keep returning until he has nothing left. He doesn't own a gun because guns and ammunition are expensive, so he borrows a trap (which is re-usable!) from a neighbouring farmer. He baits the trap with the carcass of one of the lambs that the bear attacked and waits. The next morning the bear is trapped but alive. What to do? He doesn't want to leave it like that, and he doesn't have a gun to shoot it, so he elects to finish it off with an axe. In the farmer's account he really did not want to do that but said that he had no choice in the circumstances. He still could have easily been injured by the bear and felt lucky that he wasn't.
The second account is of the local mail carriers. They were issued riles for self protection and in winter if they came across deer or elk they would shoot them and carry it into the next town in the wagon with the rest of the mail and parcels. The meat would then be cut up and distributed. It was noted that for many of the families it would be the only fresh meat they'd get to eat in the winter.
Re: Farmers always worked from home
#38> In the 1800s, 90 percent of the US population lived on a farm, rocking their WFH setups. How did they all survive without mental breakdowns and Harvard Business Review articles praising strict Work-Life Balance? They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plent…
Farming and aligned professions such as vets have an absolutely appalling suicide rate even today.
> even today
Probably should be 'these days'. I believe that's a function of modern mono cropping and corporate takeover that concentrates profit and turns a farm into an inhuman input output system.
I've known several small time farmers that had a bit of everything, and they were incredibly proud and very happy.
Re: Farmers always worked from home
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them. IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance (as does owning most low margin businesses) relative to most office jobs but... To s…
Preindustrial farming involved a lot of downtime outside of the tropics. Essentially a few weeks a year involved 14+ hour days, but there simply wasn’t that much to do the rest of the year. It’s a common misconception that summer breaks where for farmers, but historically rurual areas actually had school in summer and winter with breaks in the spring and fall simply because that’s when there was a lot of work to get…
> but there simply wasn’t that much to do the rest of the year
This kind of assumes they did not needed cloth, bedsheets, candles and other produce. And especially making fabric is super time consuming. This also assumes animals don't need daily care outside of summer. No milking cows or goats, no animal feeding, no cleaning of enclosures.
The small kids did not needed care, feeding, watching. Food cooked itself.
Re: Farmers always worked from home
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them. IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance (as does owning most low margin businesses) relative to most office jobs but... To s…
> IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance Depends on your capital investment. Like anything, if you start with a lot of money it's a pretty sweet gig. If you're having to work an off-farm job to pay the mortgage then that balance can tip pretty quickly.
I would argue that if you just providing capital seed and oversight, you aren't farming, you are investing.