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My Experience as a Rice Farmer

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Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#141

Post by saltsucker »

black3r wrote: post #72

I hear sentiments about farming from lots of burnout software developers. I always wonder what made them become developers at all. Cause my primary motivation for selecting a job was that I explicitly didn't want to ever work manually, I knew that since early childhood and it still didn't change even after 2 burnouts. My secondary motivation was that I liked working with machinery/computers. Also when I started codin…

Ya i think so. Because i resonate a lot with this comment. I workout and such, but i absolutely love this shit.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#142

Post by tastyfreeze »

I have tried for a few years to grow rice a little farther north than it likes. When learning about rice farming I was surprised by Japanese farming machines. In the US our farm machines are built for enormous pieces of land and are ungodly expensive. Japanese machines are designed for small farms and to be affordable. Small machines are something that are seemingly missing from the US farm equipment market.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#143

Post by brainless »

This is so cool. I have been in software for about 18 years but in the last few years I grew tired of the city life. My health was already affected by sedentary lifestyle - high blood glucose for many years.

I have been living in villages for about 5 years. I started a pig farm a month back. I have 16 piglets now. I still write software on a daily basis, a mix of client projects and own products. The pig farm needs about 2 hours of cleaning each day. I take care of cleaning. My business partner takes care of feeding.

I plan to grow the pig farm to a capacity of 100 pigs. It is a profitable business with roughly 30% return every 6-7 months. We give the pigs a lot more space and care than I have ever seen in any of those factory-style livestock business videos. With a 100 pigs, I will perhaps spend 5 hours a day in cleaning work - with more tools and employing a couple local folks.

Feel free to check out (links in my bio) or reach out if anyone wants to come and try this out in our little village in north eastern India. The village has large farms, growing all sorts of things.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#144

Post by adrianN »

macleginn wrote: post #61
seer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this the “city experience” in general or specifically for the United States? It famously has very poor urbanism so might not mean the same as in Europe for example. I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but magical for me. Then we moved to the middle of a European capital…

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.

A good way to destroy real forests is moving a lot of people closer to them to have a forest experience near their house.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#146

Post by [deleted] »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #70
dilawar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in North India, close to Ramganga river (Jim Corbet park is on this river). We grew rice in addition to sugar cane. The smell of paddy (and also of large quantity of cooked rice) is absolutely soothing for me and it brings back memory. During my grandfather time, it was very common for a crab to grab your fingers when you are planting the paddy. My father would chase turtles and large frogs when he was a ki…

Honestly the rice varieties in India should be promoted and protected more. The diversity and health benefits of these varieties is immense.

[deleted]

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#147

Post by helterskelter »

srean wrote: post #81
FlyingSnake wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the rice varieties in India should be promoted and protected more. The diversity and health benefits of these varieties is immense.

This is so important. Kerala in particular had a treasure trove of varieties, some well suited to low rainfall, resistant to local pests. I am sure other states had/has such diversity too, I am just not knowledgeable enough. These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.

> These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.

This is happening worldwide and is one of the tragedies of modernity. Mexico for instance has tons of regional varieties of peppers that don't grow anywhere else except for in a very specific micro climate and they're disappearing in large part because of cheap imports that makes farming them unprofitable.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#148

Post by hparadiz »

coffee_is_nom wrote: post #140
throwup238 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been my experience as well, having immigrated from Eastern Europe to an enclave in the US. We know at least a dozen families (including our own) with 2-10 acre homesteads and all of them had previous experience with gardens and dachas in the Soviet Union that they used to grow supplemental produce, so no one came into the deal with delusions of making any profit. Everyone gives away the excess to neighbors o…

Where is this wonderful community, I would love to have neighbors like your described and where I can work in tech but still have 10 acre garden.

You don't really need 10 acres. My grandparents made do with 1/4 of an acre and would have yields of 350-500 lbs of potatoes per season. That's so much that they would give it away. I have fruit trees that require almost no effort to maintain once established. My neighbors give me oranges that fall to the ground and rot otherwise. It's not all or nothing. You can have a basil plant in an apartment.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#149

Post by t-3 »

oblio wrote: post #134
t-3 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-termis…

I'm fairly sure there weren't 1.5 billion cows in the world before humans.

There were many other large mammals, but we've destroyed a lot of biodiversity already.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#150

Post by mathgladiator »

antisthenes wrote: post #137
adamjb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago > The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other dir…

> Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago Except this time, the dream is actually real and cheaper than ever thanks to small EVs, batteries and solar power. 100 years ago it was limited to people with large estates who owned cars (and probably needed secretaries for their work). These days it's more affordable than ever (except land/housing)

Some of us are living it. I plan to raise and slaughter cattle. Building a house now.
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