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Farmers always worked from home

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Re: Farmers always worked from home

#121

Post by Retric »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #48
Retric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This fantasy needs to die. When pre-industrial farmers were not in the fields all day they were not idle. They were doing tedious low intensity tasks all day instead of doing laborious tasks all day. A large part of the purpose of Sunday being a day of rest in protestant religions is that if you don't convince people there will be literal hell to pay for not taking a day off they won't take a regular day off and they…

It’s simply historically accurate as seen by the plethora of medieval holidays not just Sunday. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

“And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall).

Which isn’t to say people didn’t get things done outside of work, but we don’t consider food preparation for example as part of the workday.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#122

Post by Retric »

mason55 wrote: post #94
watwut wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it's not like your wife gets to share the labor since she has her hands full with feeding and clothing the family. At least in here, a lot of animal care was traditionally done by women. So did quite a lot of field work - a lot of it does not require that much physical strength. And clothing is quite serious time consuming work, really. The amount of time required to make the fabric is quite huge.

Plus laundry. The invention of the washing machine is literally one of the things that allowed women to get jobs outside the house.

Laundry used to be extremely uncommon activity, among other things it damages extremely expensive clothing. It really only started to consume significant time as the production of textiles exploded.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#123

Post by TaupeRanger »

gifwithaj wrote: post #34
TaupeRanger wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spec…

Yikes...accusing me of something akin to racism seems harsh. I am a musician myself, and am always curious about what brings people from other disciplines to HN. Apologies if I caused any offense.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#124

Post by s1artibartfast »

chirau wrote: post #90
snarf21 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

I have to disagree with you. Or maybe farming is just terrible here in the US because of all the rules and crap with companies like Monsanto. Where I come from, farming is a pretty fulfilling endeavor. Both my parents left senior corporate roles to pursue farming because they love it so much. Even when they made their first money working, they bought a piece of land and were there pretty much every weekend. They star…

I think reasonable people can agree that there is not a single farming experience. There are more and less successful farms based on their business model and business environment. There are also differences in people's disposition. There are hobby farms, family farms, and multinational businesses.

In my experience, the biggest concerns are crop performance and government policy. All the farmers I know in california recently recently had their lives ruined when the state eminent domained their water rights without compensation. They lost their retirement, land value, 30 years of capital investment, and their entire life's labor. It is heartbreaking and I wouldnt be surprised if some of them commit suicide.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#125

Post by nonameiguess »

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 didn't even remotely try to look up the real number (I did look up the child mortality, but didn't exactly vet the source).

Consider it hyperbole if it helps, but whatever the exact number, a whole lot of people living on farms were either dying as children or living in bondage, neither of which is a situation I would consider doing perfectly fine without mental breakdowns or help from Harvard Business Review. Even for the rest of the people, I somewhat doubt having most of your children die or being a slave driver was particularly great for mental health, either. Someone downstream also mentioned Native Americans driving down the proportion of slaves. Sure, but I also don't think having all your land gradually taken and your civilization hunted to extinction was great for mental health.

Whatever the exact numbers were in an era where we barely even tried to measure stuff like this, I believe this writer's rosy view of antebellum American life is badly out of touch.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#127

Post by TaupeRanger »

chucksta wrote: post #80
TaupeRanger wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A farmer on Hacker News? Please tell me more.

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

Haven't seen much talk about farming here at all. It was just a curious question.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#128

Post by [deleted] »

obeid wrote: post #111
akiselev wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Entitlement" is a term of art [1] that means that the farmers are legally entitled to those benefits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement

Doesn't mean it was not a bad choice of a word to represent the concept. Politicians who create and use these terms are doing it with intent, if it was up to them, they would indeed starve the farmers, you, me and everyone we know.

[deleted]

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#129

Post by dragontamer »

redmaverick wrote: post #115
dragontamer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no farmer, but you can see the extremely expensive and sophisticated farming machines pretty much every time you drive past a rural area. Giant watering machines, extremely weird "collector" thingies, and a whole slew of farmers complaining to John Deere about "right to repair". Modern Farming is about having huge infrastructure so that very few people can create lots and lots of food. Between the fertilizer, the…

are there any startup opportunities / products built for farmers that can generate revenue?

I assume there are plenty, but you'd be competing against John Deere / Monsanto etc.

These companies are in fact doing hard science and engineering. For an example of your competition:

https://www.planttape.com/

So yeah, form a startup but you need to be in the top of your science / engineering game. But everyone wants a more automated, cheaper, more reliable, less water usage, planting / growing methodology. Plenty of opportunity if you actually have something that's better than the status quo.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#130

Post by tdeck »

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…

Here's a lighthearted sketch on the topic: https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE
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