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Farmers always worked from home

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Re: Farmers always worked from home

#71

Post by whall6 »

NationalPark wrote: post #66
spelunker wrote: post #55

This whole article reads like someone out of touch. We went to the countryside to observe the pastoral lifestyle! Hey look at these farmers! They're "working from home" all the time! Wow look at them milking cows! Farming is a hell of a lot of work and they have a poor "work life balance" out of necessity. There's too much to do. Maybe they find it rewarding, but I don't think it's an ideal everyone should be strivin…

There's no mention of all the government assistance in terms of loans, infrastructure, subsidies, welfare programs for employee healthcare and retirement, etc. Maybe if other industries had as many entitlements they would make fodder for disillusioned urban bloggers as well.

Also no mention that rural suicide rates are higher than urban

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#72

Post by screye »

watwut wrote: post #53
screye wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most of the people working on farms were slaves Does that compute? Less than 10% of the US population were slaves and 90% were employed in farming. It seems unbelievable to me that farms were manned exclusively or even in majority by slaves. Now most slaves were employed in farms, but I'm not sure if that relationship is bi directional

Where do you have less then 10% of US population being slaves from? I found 18 percent of the total population in 1790, or roughly one in every six people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-... And based on what I know, it then went up due to cotton boom.

You're correct that it seems to have peaked around 18%, but mostly hovered between 10-18%. It sat around 15% during the civil war.

Note that these numbers do not include native Americans, who constituted between 1-3 million themselves, since the census didn't count them. Considering them as part of the total should indeed bring the numbers under 10%. Whether that is fair or not is up to the reader :)

I still maintain that the majority of the people working on farms were most likely white. This is especially true since many states did not have slaves at all. I will admit that it is likely, that the most gruelling work on the field was given to the slaves.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#73

Post by AlexTWithBeard »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #50

Working for yourself, at your own pace, and doing things you chose to do and can choose to no longer do (like growing rye or having chickens as the article names) are a lot less stressful than working for someone else, with their deadlines, doing things they chose to do, like growing rye or having chickens. If you do it yourself you can set yourself boundaries. If some other schmuck does it you can get yourself a big…

> working for someone else, with their deadlines

The problem is that you cannot discuss deadlines with chickens either: they have to be fed on time, or else.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#74

Post by retzkek »

duxup wrote: post #56
retzkek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably important to be precise about what type of farming - commercial vs subsistence - while acknowledging that many farmers fall somewhere in the middle. I think you're describing the former, while this article is more about the latter.

"Commercial" farming is no assurance of stability either.

I was actually leaning the other way: probably easier to scratch out a subsistence living than to try to make a consistent profit.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#75

Post by maweki »

NationalPark wrote: post #66
spelunker wrote: post #55

This whole article reads like someone out of touch. We went to the countryside to observe the pastoral lifestyle! Hey look at these farmers! They're "working from home" all the time! Wow look at them milking cows! Farming is a hell of a lot of work and they have a poor "work life balance" out of necessity. There's too much to do. Maybe they find it rewarding, but I don't think it's an ideal everyone should be strivin…

There's no mention of all the government assistance in terms of loans, infrastructure, subsidies, welfare programs for employee healthcare and retirement, etc. Maybe if other industries had as many entitlements they would make fodder for disillusioned urban bloggers as well.

"Entitlements" is a strange word for this. The fact is, that farming dairy, cattle, and produce pays so little through the primary market that those people would starve if not for government subsidies. The people who literally prevent every other person on the continent from starving.

Farming is hard and pays little.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#76

Post by mc32 »

screye wrote: post #42
nonameiguess wrote: post #4

> 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…

> most of the people working on farms were slaves Does that compute? Less than 10% of the US population were slaves and 90% were employed in farming. It seems unbelievable to me that farms were manned exclusively or even in majority by slaves. Now most slaves were employed in farms, but I'm not sure if that relationship is bi directional

I may be wrong, here, so correct me if I'm off.

My understanding is slaveholding was mostly by plantations (large farms engaged in commercial crops tobacco/cotton). Most farms were not plantations (or haciendas/fazendas south of the border coffee, sugarcane, mining). So most farms in the south had no slaves, but large plantations had many slaves.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#77

Post by arethuza »

mschild wrote: post #41
alistairSH wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beat me to it! For those who don't know Jeremy Clarkson, he was one of the hosts of the UK's Top Gear (highly rated car show on BBC). Last year, he did a show about his farm in the Cotswolds. He's owned it for a while, but had a tenant farmer. That bloke retired, so Clarkson decided to run the farm himself (with help from a consultant and the existing farm staff). Even with scripted bits and typical Clarkson sillines…

I have no doubt that farming can be an incredibly taxing job, but taking Clarkson, notorious for making stupid decisions, as an example of farming isn't exactly accurate. He made many things harder and more expensive than they had to be. The prime example is his oversized, expensive tractor. Throughout the series, whether this was scripted or not I cannot say, I often got the feeling that he had absolutely no clue wh…

I think the whole point of the show is that Clarkson makes mistakes and then has to be corrected by sensible people who do know what they are doing.

Clearly it was planned this way but I thought it worked really well.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#78

Post by weinzierl »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #50

Working for yourself, at your own pace, and doing things you chose to do and can choose to no longer do (like growing rye or having chickens as the article names) are a lot less stressful than working for someone else, with their deadlines, doing things they chose to do, like growing rye or having chickens. If you do it yourself you can set yourself boundaries. If some other schmuck does it you can get yourself a big…

> "are financially secure."

That's the key point: If you are financially secure you will have less stress.

If you are not, you just change your dependence on a boss to a dependence on weather, bugs, pests and plant diseases.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#79

Post by snarf21 »

spelunker wrote: post #55

This whole article reads like someone out of touch. We went to the countryside to observe the pastoral lifestyle! Hey look at these farmers! They're "working from home" all the time! Wow look at them milking cows! Farming is a hell of a lot of work and they have a poor "work life balance" out of necessity. There's too much to do. Maybe they find it rewarding, but I don't think it's an ideal everyone should be strivin…

The only people who think farming sounds great are people who have never farmed. Having all your income depend on the weather or random government policies/tariffs is heart breaking. You need tremendous scale to weather the storm. Go watch "Clarkson's Farm" to get a glimpse of the realities. (Remember that he is extremely rich and doesn't even care if the farm loses money.) The only good thing about farming is that you only have to work half days, just pick any 12 hours you like!! (Source: both of my families have historically farmed.)

I think there is old line about how to become rich racing cars. First, you start out extremely rich. Then, you start a race team. The same is true with farming. Unless you start out rich or inherited the farm for free, it is going to be a slog.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#80

Post by chucksta »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #8
pueblito wrote: post #2

This 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.

What is surprising about that? Farmers were are a driving force for right to repair
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