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Farmers always worked from home

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Re: Farmers always worked from home

#41

Post by mschild »

alistairSH wrote: post #20
barrenko wrote: post #7

Watch Clarkson's Farm and then try again.

Beat me to it! For those who don't know Jeremy Clarkson, he was one of the hosts of the UK's Top Gear (highly rated car show on BBC). Last year, he did a show about his farm in the Cotswolds. He's owned it for a while, but had a tenant farmer. That bloke retired, so Clarkson decided to run the farm himself (with help from a consultant and the existing farm staff). Even with scripted bits and typical Clarkson sillines…

I have no doubt that farming can be an incredibly taxing job, but taking Clarkson, notorious for making stupid decisions, as an example of farming isn't exactly accurate.

He made many things harder and more expensive than they had to be. The prime example is his oversized, expensive tractor. Throughout the series, whether this was scripted or not I cannot say, I often got the feeling that he had absolutely no clue what he was doing and tried winging it.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#42

Post by screye »

nonameiguess wrote: post #4

> In the 1800s, 90 percent of the US population lived on a farm, rocking their WFH setups. How did they all survive without mental breakdowns and Harvard Business Review articles praising strict Work-Life Balance? They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plent…

> most of the people working on farms were slaves

Does that compute? Less than 10% of the US population were slaves and 90% were employed in farming. It seems unbelievable to me that farms were manned exclusively or even in majority by slaves.

Now most slaves were employed in farms, but I'm not sure if that relationship is bi directional

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#43

Post by bin_bash »

Retric wrote: post #21
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them. IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance (as does owning most low margin businesses) relative to most office jobs but... To s…

Preindustrial farming involved a lot of downtime outside of the tropics. Essentially a few weeks a year involved 14+ hour days, but there simply wasn’t that much to do the rest of the year. It’s a common misconception that summer breaks where for farmers, but historically rurual areas actually had school in summer and winter with breaks in the spring and fall simply because that’s when there was a lot of work to get…

I grew up on a farm and we worked throughout the year on property my ancestors homesteaded in the 1840s. If there wasn’t field work to be done there was always a fence that needed to be repaired, a new trough to be replaced, or something.

I can’t see how it would be possible in pre-industrial time to have “not much to do” anytime of the year. Simply having the buildings stand up without falling apart is a surprising amount of work.

Nobody in my family history did anything but farming and joining the military btw

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#44

Post by giantg2 »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #8
pueblito wrote: post #2

This article is ridiculous. I’m a farmer and clearly I have time to surf the internet, and separating work from life is absolutely something I do - and my fathers before me. Grandma would’ve never put up with shop talk at the dinner table.

A farmer on Hacker News? Please tell me more.

Not the same person, but I have an agricultural license and run an LLC related to beekeeping/honey production. I don't think I would call myself a farmer simply because I don't make a significant amount of my income from it (I think my state sets the bar at 30%)

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#45

Post by randomdata »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #40
randomdata wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance Depends on your capital investment. Like anything, if you start with a lot of money it's a pretty sweet gig. If you're having to work an off-farm job to pay the mortgage then that balance can tip pretty quickly.

I would argue that if you just providing capital seed and oversight, you aren't farming, you are investing.

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

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#46

Post by supermatt »

enumjorge wrote: post #23
supermatt wrote: post #17

As a farmer, always working from home, I realise I am exceptionally privileged not to be trapped in a tiny apartment during multi-month covid lockdowns. It must be hard to keep any balance when you are eating, sleeping, working and resting in the same box

You’re the 3rd person to mention being a farmer. Do we have a bunch of farmers on HN? That’s really interesting. What brings you here?

Raised in a farming family. Worked in IT for 20 years. Bought my own farm from proceeds. Still keep my hand in with software dev. Like projects for the winter :)

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#47

Post by s1artibartfast »

reedjosh wrote: post #38
chrisseaton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming and aligned professions such as vets have an absolutely appalling suicide rate even today.

> even today Probably should be 'these days'. I believe that's a function of modern mono cropping and corporate takeover that concentrates profit and turns a farm into an inhuman input output system. I've known several small time farmers that had a bit of everything, and they were incredibly proud and very happy.

I think we would have to look at the historic data to draw that conclusion.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#48

Post by throwaway0a5e »

Retric wrote: post #21
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them. IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance (as does owning most low margin businesses) relative to most office jobs but... To s…

Preindustrial farming involved a lot of downtime outside of the tropics. Essentially a few weeks a year involved 14+ hour days, but there simply wasn’t that much to do the rest of the year. It’s a common misconception that summer breaks where for farmers, but historically rurual areas actually had school in summer and winter with breaks in the spring and fall simply because that’s when there was a lot of work to get…

This fantasy needs to die.

When pre-industrial farmers were not in the fields all day they were not idle. They were doing tedious low intensity tasks all day instead of doing laborious tasks all day. A large part of the purpose of Sunday being a day of rest in protestant religions is that if you don't convince people there will be literal hell to pay for not taking a day off they won't take a regular day off and they will work to the point of overwork and reduced output.

Even a naive napkin math estimation of the labor required to keep a 1810s farm house and barn maintained and a few work animals fed and watered should make it clear how much labor needed to be put in before you even get to the farming aspect of it. And it's not like your wife gets to share the labor since she has her hands full with feeding and clothing the family. Pre-industrial farmers did not have the luxury of factory made clothes nor grocery store butter nor a galvanized barn roof nor a tractor.

In the US most of these people were literate and we have enough written accounts that we can accurately reconstruct how they spent their time. It suffices to say that they didn't deforest the northeast and carpet bomb it with stone walls by working 40hr weeks.

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#49

Post by ecshafer »

nonameiguess wrote: post #4

> In the 1800s, 90 percent of the US population lived on a farm, rocking their WFH setups. How did they all survive without mental breakdowns and Harvard Business Review articles praising strict Work-Life Balance? They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plent…

>most of the people working on farms were slaves

This is false. 90% of the US were farmers. This is going to be subsistence farmers and people who own farms, sharecroppers, etc. The highest rate of slavery was around 10% of the total population, as the northern states had higher populations, though some individual states had very high rates of slavery.

https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/statistics_on_slavery.htm

Re: Farmers always worked from home

#50

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Working for yourself, at your own pace, and doing things you chose to do and can choose to no longer do (like growing rye or having chickens as the article names) are a lot less stressful than working for someone else, with their deadlines, doing things they chose to do, like growing rye or having chickens.

If you do it yourself you can set yourself boundaries. If some other schmuck does it you can get yourself a bigger rye field and just tell him it has to be all done by the end of the day, or whatever else you can make them do for 8+ hours a day.

I mean I wouldn't idealize farming per se, if it's your livelihood and you can't compete with the industrial farming complex, but I can see how it can be a lot less stressful if you're your own boss and are financially secure.

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