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A farmer on Hacker News? Please tell me more.
I'm sure you didn't mean to cause offense, but this comment is so incredibly frustrating and highlights the incredible ignorance and stereotyping of rural America that's still common. My reaction to this comment was to shudder the same way as if someone had said "A black person on hacker news? Please tell me more" Modern farmers are polyglot technologists. Hybrid GMO seeds are selected to optimize yield in their spec…
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>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…
"So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25.
And that's just a standard shirt.
And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving."
https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
> Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). These figures come way down once we get the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, but what seems fairly readily apparently is that women did not necessarily work less so much as produce more, selling the excess via the ‘putting out’ system we mentioned last time and using that to support their families.
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 big…
This is the key point. I can imagine being a farmer is a lot more nerve wracking if e.g. bad whether destroys your year's harvest – for the third time in a row.
If you're financially secure, any job is less stressful, regardless whether you're self employed or not.
Historically speaking farming has been a very up and down business and not a good way to make a living. In the US we have this idea that there was a golden age of farming, but the cycles of boom and bust and etc have been all over the map, often short and unpredictable. Even the historical homestead type plots were potentially unsustainable at the time they were given away. Not everyone is cut out to run their own bu…
- a lot of it is really "boss-self" balance. It's different doing things like farming where you're working hard for yourself versus having to be online to service the whims of someone else. Furthermore, the schedules of farming are imposed by the physical universe. You have to pick crops when they're ripe. The fact that this is non-negotiable and also physically obvious somehow makes it easier to deal with.
- "bullshit jobs" (Graeber passim): if you're not happy with the job, or its objectives don't make sense to you, then extending those nonsensical imperatives into the rest of your life just wrecks your happiness because you can't keep it in a timebox. Farming may involve physical shit, but at least the objectives imposed (e.g. harvest crops before they rot) are meaningful.
- reduced "life" options: farmers don't go out in the evening. Or the weekend. Or the holidays.
This whole article reads like someone out of touch. We went to the countryside to observe the pastoral lifestyle! Hey look at these farmers! They're "working from home" all the time! Wow look at them milking cows! Farming is a hell of a lot of work and they have a poor "work life balance" out of necessity. There's too much to do. Maybe they find it rewarding, but I don't think it's an ideal everyone should be strivin…
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 big…
If anybody working for themselves would disagree with this thought, farmers are high on the list.
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.
My situation was different because my dad ran a business on the side that was booked a year in advance, and in the winter I was in school.
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 big…
I highly recommend "Clarkson's Farm" on Amazon Prime, it's an interesting look at someone trying out the farm life, and is quite entertaining, especially for Top Gear and Grand Tour fans
Historically speaking farming has been a very up and down business and not a good way to make a living. In the US we have this idea that there was a golden age of farming, but the cycles of boom and bust and etc have been all over the map, often short and unpredictable. Even the historical homestead type plots were potentially unsustainable at the time they were given away. Not everyone is cut out to run their own bu…
It's probably important to be precise about what type of farming - commercial vs subsistence - while acknowledging that many farmers fall somewhere in the middle. I think you're describing the former, while this article is more about the latter.