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My Experience as a Rice Farmer

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Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#101

Post by RataNova »

aurareturn wrote: post #5

As a child, I grew up in a village in China and our family farmed rice. It was mostly my mom who was doing the farming while my dad worked in the city. Some things I remember: * Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields * Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields * Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our village during harvest * The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again…

It's nice to hear someone who's been on both sides still hold onto that appreciation

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#102

Post by bwv848 »

oblio wrote: post #96
bwv848 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference? All have to live under central planning, all have to live with hubris of the rich and elites, at least Mars sounds way cooler than living in cities.

If you think Musk doesn't want central planning, you're sorely misunderstanding his point of view. Musk wants to be a founding father. And just as the OG founding fathers, his problem isn't necessarily with the centralization part in general, but with the centralizing being done by others. There's a reason the original American voters were all white land owning men (and in some cases, slave owning men!).

I agree with your point but you guys really have to take a look at what I was replying to and was I being serious at all.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#103

Post by RataNova »

aledevv wrote: post #46

> Doing a day of manual labour, chatting shit, then going for the onsen and some BBQ and beers is far better than grinding away at some enterprise SaaS that will probably disappear in a few years. I particularly agree with this statement. I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century. We believed that office labor was more important and healthier than manual labor. I don't think so. As a d…

AI might shake things up, but I wonder if instead of "going back," it'll just blur the lines

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#105

Post by throwaway27448 »

esseph wrote: post #33
TrackerFF wrote: post #15

It is probably a nice experience to have, but imagine your body after doing this for 50-60 years. You're one serious back injury away from being unemployed.

Much like carpentry, or electrical work, or concrete, or just about any of the trades. Any labor throughout human history.

> Any labor throughout human history.

Sure, but sedentary labor destroys the body through neglect—which is ultimately a choice.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#106

Post by defrost »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #99
defrost wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farms - with a near infinitesimal number of farmers compared to the numbers living in cities .. exactly as things are trending now. It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots. eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpNMSSGWnOI

So not really "fairly untouched", then. You're going to need more farms and more farmers, and no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.

Let's see, I didn't make any claim about untouched - although I do have some strong positions on wetlands cover, corridors, wild old forrest, et al but that's a whole other aside.

I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people than you might expect.

as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.

what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets currently say about food volume tonnages and trip lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op

  handles handysize to post-Panamax vessel shipments from Australia, United States, Canada, South America and Europe to key grain markets in Asia, Europe, Central America and the Middle East.
( from: https://www.cbh.com.au/exports-overview )

and there are other grain basins about the globe.

The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines.

That and making sure the front doesn't fall off.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#107

Post by oblio »

bwv848 wrote: post #102
oblio wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think Musk doesn't want central planning, you're sorely misunderstanding his point of view. Musk wants to be a founding father. And just as the OG founding fathers, his problem isn't necessarily with the centralization part in general, but with the centralizing being done by others. There's a reason the original American voters were all white land owning men (and in some cases, slave owning men!).

I agree with your point but you guys really have to take a look at what I was replying to and was I being serious at all.

Oooops :-D

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#108

Post by [deleted] »

adrian_b wrote: post #69
anonymous908213 wrote: post #2

This was mostly a nice read, I do enjoy these kinds of slice-of-life blogs. I think it might have been a bit better without making claims about the economic future and history of rice farming or whatever, if the author doesn't even speak the language it's unlikely they have any real insight to offer and whatever shallow information they got off a random Youtube video is liable to be spreading misinformation that misl…

The communist policy everywhere was to rob the small farmers and small business owners of everything they owned and force them to become quasi-serfs. The socialist/communist economy is the final extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, towards which USA and other Western countries have been continuously evolving during the last quarter of century. The economy of USA in 2026 is much more similar to the economy of one…

[deleted]

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#109

Post by callmeal »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #22
TheDong wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed it's a roughly 2x increase (5kg supermarket bag from 2000 jpy to 4000). Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.

> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc. There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat. Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.

>rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food

Um, rice is real food too, right?

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#110

Post by callmeal »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #71
TurdF3rguson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It fluctuates but on average maybe 5 humans and 10 dogs.

You give rice to the dogs, too?

Yup - family dogs eat what we do. Funny story - my mom's dog will not eat rice unless there's also fish (leftover bones will do). Rice+fish - bowl is cleaned up. Rice+meat - only the meat is picked and eaten.
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