Looking at my future given this wave of AI!
My Experience as a Rice Farmer
151–160 of 226 posts
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, but there weren't that many large grazing animals because most of the world was covered in woods, not pastures. Trees are the most successful large creatures and we've probably reduced their habitat by 50%.
That's the actual tragedy. Forests contain a lot more like per cubic km than pastures do.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#153Earlier 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.
We're not neighbors unfortunately because we're spread out all over Southern California. By "enclave" I mean the area between West Hollywood and Arcadia, where many Eastern Europeans immigrated during the post-Soviet brain drain, not a dense conglomerate like San Gabriel.
BTW you do NOT want ten acres. That is a back breaking amount of work and even with modern technology you'll struggle to cope (it's not enough to afford most heavy equipment, but too much to do manually). You want an acre or two where you have enough space to plant trees. It takes a few years from nursery to fruiting, but they are far lower maintenance.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So unfortunate. Short term thinking doing its damage.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#155As 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…
Similar experience!
It's a very unique and fulfilling experience to be one with the nature. You get to learn that chickens eat almost anything. There's definitely a sense of belonging in nature that I miss
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#156This 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 a…
This is feels like life imitates art (the plot Stardew Valley). I hope you and your farm find great success!
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#157> 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…
It truly is not a choice, as I cannot sustain my family / lifestyle with manual labor. Opting into working out for the sake of my health is not nearly the same.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#158Earlier 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.
Lots of places have community gardens. Hell, I go to one in the middle of NYC, a rooftop garden run by a friend. We even grow our own wheat for bread making.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is my understanding too, but many people equate rural life with „natural“. Unfortunately the rural environment is all but natural. The cultural landscape that has been engineered over centuries all but displaced true wilderness and is largely devoid of biodiversity. The better we become at industrial agriculture, the worse the situation is.
Not everywhere, you are looking at only suburbs vs cities.
True rural farming is still bad for nature because the land is cleared of biodiversity to make way for farm land. It is arguably worse than cities because a lot more land per person is cleared.
Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer
#160Earlier 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.
It is often costlier and worse for the environment to ship locally than across the world.
https://www.wpr.org/news/locally-grown-fruits-veggies-expens...