My Experience as a Rice Farmer • Hacker News Board

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#111

Post by fer » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

kubanczyk wrote: post #64

fer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that communistic? The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt. It's not dissimilar to pre-1929 kulaks, though the kulaks were encouraged/enabled to become a relatively wealthy/middle class peasantry who employed people and were directly involved in the production without owning large swathes of land, acting as a kind of a social dampener against a revolution. Unsurprisin…

> The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt. So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy. > Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic. Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration…

>Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.

Lenin preached for state capitalism as a transitory state towards socialism. It's an integral part of the communist ideas, part of the direction even if not part of the ideal final state.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#112

Post by t-3 » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:34 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #95

vkou wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very large fraction of land (~50%) is currently used to grow biomass to feed 8 billion humans. Nothing about that land is 'natural' - it's a carefully engineered environment that's quite hostile to animal life. The land that people live on, whether it's in a city, a suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to those demands.

We could probably reduced cultivated land by 50% if we would stop wanting to eat mid-sized or large animals (cows and pigs).

It's not that simple. Large herbivores are necessary for many environments and useful agriculturally even if we didn't eat them. Desertification caused by removing trees and grazing without replenishing, nutrients lost because sunlight and wind are scraping the bare soil, monoculture deserts and insecticides killing off pollinators and destroying ecologies... It's the factory farming and profit-motivated short-termist resource extraction that's a problem, not the cows and pigs. We can transition to sustainable methods without decreasing food variety.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#113

Post by hparadiz » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

FlyingSnake wrote: post #86

vintermann wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, those who quit their jobs and open coffee shops almost certainly make a bad choice for themselves economically and work/ life balance wise... But they do wonderful things for their community, and - a questionable benefit to society but a huge benefit to some - real estate prices. People love these places. They capture a tiny fraction of the value they create, if we look at it in cold terms. That can't really be…

I meant it as a pipe-dream that people jump into without knowing the hidden asymmetries. Farming of any kind is hard and learning that specific skillset is necessary to succeed.

For most folks it's just an add on. I have grandparents in Europe that have a garden where they grew potatoes and about 50 other things I'm not gonna list. They make jams, pickled things, and various other preserves. It's something to do and kept them sharp until they hit their late 80s.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#114

Post by zdragnar » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:40 PM UTC

defrost wrote: post #106

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Com…

And yet, farmers still need roads, and hardware stores, and grocery stores, and hospitals, and HVAC and plumbers and before you know it, you need villages for all the people those people depend on, along with their families.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#115

Post by stunseed » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

throwaway27448 wrote: post #97

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…

I don't think it's that deep: Obligatory manual labor destroys the body (and, often, the mind) and what time you have you spend exhausted. Being entirely sedentary remains a choice for us office workers—this is why people exercise and spend time outside. Of course, I would like more flexibility in choosing how much I and where I do my sedentary labor, so I might devote time to, say, gardening. But it's easy to forget…

> But it's easy to forget that humans have spent most of human history trying to escape subsistence farming.

Do you define human history as the last ~10k years or last ~100k-500k years?

But yes, certainly at least the last 3000 years for most humans have been spent farming to a large degree. But if we are even moderate in estimations of human origins, farming is very recent.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#116

Post by macleginn » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #98

macleginn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.

Some of this is being slowly reverted: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/2de...

This is very nice, but unfortunately, it will take forever (in human-life terms) to bring "real" forests back.

(In my previous post, I forgot to mention stunning rainforests near Sintra in Portugal.)

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#117

Post by aledevv » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

teruakohatu wrote: post #88

sdevonoes wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to do manual labor as long as: I have a decent house, decent health insurance, can afford decent food/stuff, can afford taking sabbaticals, can afford getting sick and not losing my income, can afford decent education for kids, etc. Unfortunately, many of us are chained to the modern way of life.

Don’t forget doing only enough manual labour not to get hurt, killed or develop a chronic condition. You can make a lot of money doing many skilled manual jobs in my country. Trades are highly paid and there is not enough supply. Better money than software development. They often wreck their backs, or develop other chronic conditions. The successful ones stop doing manual work by the time they are in their 40s and mo…

@teruakohatu Some example of manual labor well payed in your country? In Italy, sometime manual labors are more safe than others not manual jobs.

This is because often the rules and laws protects still human instead the profits.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#118

Post by watwut » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 2:02 PM UTC

aurareturn wrote: post #20

troupo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places. Why? Honest question. A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities many of which exist only because there are enough people interested.

Why? Honest question. I don't necessarily think everyone should move out of cities to go back to living in rural areas and villages. I want it so that living outside of the city more viable than it is today because there are very real benefits to living there. In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts…

City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends. That is completely normal in most world cities. And yes, where public transport exists, city kids do use public transport to get to school, to visit friends or to go to the gym.

> I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society.

The weird thing is, rural people show a lot of distrust and fear that city people seem to show less. Rural people just assume that city means danger and fear.

> depression was just not really a thing in a village.

This is simply not true. If you look at social issues like alcoholism, drug use, suicides or domestic violence ... villages have plenty of those. They have harder availability of psychologists and psychiatrists. That does not mean issues do not exist there, they measurably do.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#119

Post by somenameforme » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

sheept wrote: post #23

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…

> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places. Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes. The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infr…

Here's a fun thought experiment for you. If you dug a 1 mile cubic square hole. How many humans could you fit into it? The answer is not only all of us but about around an order of magnitude more on top. I'm not sure if this emphasizes how few humans there are, or how massive the Earth is. But it's the same point in both cases.

Some human activities can have an outsized impact, but the overwhelming majority of those activities remain necessary regardless of where people live, and some will have an greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but require complete centralization in urban settings.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#120

Post by defrost » Tue, Apr 07, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

zdragnar wrote: post #114

defrost wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Com…

And yet, farmers still need roads, and hardware stores, and grocery stores, and hospitals, and HVAC and plumbers and before you know it, you need villages for all the people those people depend on, along with their families.

Farming communities have already had these things, the broad pattern is that fewer and fewer of thiese thigs are needed as fewer and fewer people are needed to work the same land.

Urbanisation ratios have increased, farm worker percentages decreased, average land area holdings increased so stores, schools, etc. are closing.

As time passes now, more an more old farm hoses are vacant island in an ocean of larger consolidated workings.