Farmers always worked from home • Hacker News Board

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#131

Post by loriverkutya » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #87

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'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…

You are not a crop doctor, that’s a completely separate job source: my friend done it as university major.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#132

Post by Rochus » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

Farmers never work from home.

Has he ever been at a farm? The farmer does not live where the cattle live, and the animal feed is not stored where he lives. Farmers are in the barn or working in the field most of the time. When they are at home, they eat or sleep, or occasionally watch TV, although after an 18-hour day one is usually too tired to do so.

And there are even many more farmers who do not have their own land, and often have to travel far to get to the rented farm or field. And there are even more farm workers who travel far and wide by the thousands during the harvest to do their work.

Many people have an unrealistic idea of rural life.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#133

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

jeromegv wrote: post #91

kvgr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if the subsidies stopped and some farmers quit, then the producers would have to pay more. And farmers would return. I don’t get this constant subsidies to farmers everywhere. We take your taxes and shove it to farmers so you can have cheap corn and get fat. Maybe if some products werent so heavily subsidiest farmers would other, better food.

There's a strategic advantage for a country to grow your own produce. You drop all subsidies, it's likely that you can't compete with country XYZ and now suddenly one of the most important thing for your citizen has to be imported instead of being produced locally. This has lots of side effects and of course you are more at the mercy of international supply chain problems (COVID!) which cause shortage, high cost, etc…

[deleted]

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#134

Post by op00to » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

Farmers have incredibly high incidence of mental health issues compared to the general population. Farmers are under incredible stress. Farmers are more likely to say life is not worth living than the general population. Maybe they are not a good example. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6926562/

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#135

Post by op00to » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

thisisnico wrote: post #108

chirau wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Both of my parents grew up as farmers. It's an astronomical amount of work. The costs are insane, unless you have massive scale it's impossible to compete. The farmland was sold off to large scale farming operations because they can afford to handle ups/downs, they can make extremely efficient use of the incredibly expensive equipment needed to farm. The only way I can see someone successful in a farming endeavour is…

Or you’re rich and you just don’t care if you lose a crop which would literally bankrupt other small farmers

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#136

Post by lasagnaphil » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #6

I think the problem is, the work (on computers) is never done. It takes months for me to say, "well, I got that wheat harvested" (in computer terms). There's always some more bullshit, so you can't just step away; more is always waiting, and you're always blocking someone somehow. The way we make money digitally does not map to a practical, dynamic life. We need to re-structure what "work" is, what it is we are tryin…

It's not that the work is never done, it's just that most of what we really work on computers is actually made-up bullshit and doesn't really connect to producing actual material things. (You earn money for it though, but money is as immaterial as it gets... and then you get to spend the majority of it on rent, education, healthcare, and various services, which are also all immaterial things.) Actual production seemed to have disappeared in today's neoliberal societies: they're either relegated to the Third World, or automated enough for not that many people to participate in. But the twist is: the nostalgia of productive "down-to-earth" work now becomes a captivating force, but that is exactly what the current system wants to provide you with the fantasy of work.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#137

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:30 PM UTC

snarf21 wrote: post #79

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 y…

[deleted]

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#138

Post by randomdata » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:35 PM UTC

s1artibartfast wrote: post #113

randomdata wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally what farmer is defined as: Someone who owns or manages a farm. If farmers aren't farming, what are they doing?

My point is that a CEO at an investment firm that passively owns a farm is not a farmer, at least for the purpose of getting an accurate understanding of a farmer's work life balance. Similarly, business operations desk jockey for a multinational ag business is not a farmer. I think the parent post was referring to those who perform physical labor on a farm and directly oversee that labor. Yes, I am gatekeeping being…

Regardless, I was originally talking about people you actually think of farmers. Not people like Bill Gates who are technically farmers but have little association with the industry.

It remains that it is a pretty good gig if your capital costs are covered. I'm a farmer myself (I do the work, not just an investment), so I say that from first-hand experience. The amount you can make per hour of work is incredible, and the number of hours required per year are minimal. This isn't the olden days where you had to spend all winter in the bush in order to have heat. Pretty much everything is automated, outsourced, and outside of the peak season it is fairly hands-off.

The vast majority of farmers also work off-farm jobs to pay for those capital costs, however. That is where the work/life balance starts to falter. Both farming and working a full-time job can absolutely impact that balance.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#139

Post by tailspin2019 » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 5:44 PM UTC

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…

> This whole article reads like someone out of touch.

I didn’t read it that way at all.

> Farming is a hell of a lot of work

Hence I guess, the mention of early starts and 16 hour days.

> Maybe they find it rewarding, but I don't think it's an ideal everyone should be striving for.

Maybe they do find it rewarding. I think the point in the article was not to downplay how much work farming involves, or to say they have it easy, or even to suggest that people should be farmers…

The point I took from the article is how integrated/intertwined the farmer’s work is with the rest of their day, as opposed to say rigid 9-5 office hours. The lines are more blurry for them. They (generally) live and work in the same place. It’s definitely not like “working from home” in the sense that we normally think of, but there are some interesting parallels and challenges around trying to keep life in balance (if that’s even thing anyway). It’s a useful and very different perspective from which to look at the concept of “work” and how it integrates into our lives.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#140

Post by spelunker » Tue, Jul 27, 2021, 6:05 PM UTC

agumonkey wrote: post #116

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…

I really wonder what causes the long hours ? market dynamics running prices to the ground until the guys cant squeeze any more minute from a day ? or just too much tradition in organization forcing them to spend more time than necessary in the fields ?

I think it's the former. I have relatives who farm, and for farming to be profitable requires a _lot_ of product to sell.

I also have non-blood relatives trying to start a small farm in rural Pennsylvania. They tried growing and selling oat last year. Apparently it wasn't worth the effort unless they were going to grow and sell it at at huge quantities.

Farming isn't necessarily traditions-based. My established farming relatives have incredible $100k+ combines that can practically harvest on their own via GPS with little supervision required. They just need to grow a lot to be profitable (which scaling helps with of course).