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My Experience as a Rice Farmer

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71–80 of 226 posts

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my house eats 100kg of rice in a month What’s the maths on that? A cup of rice would seem a fair bit for a person for a meal. A cup is about 200g. That’s 500 portions a month. 5.5 people for 3 meals a day?

It fluctuates but on average maybe 5 humans and 10 dogs.

You give rice to the dogs, too?

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#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 coding, it immediately felt like my passion. And the thing I love most about coding is that mostly all changes I make have instantly visible results. I couldn't imagine working a job where I had to plant a seed and then wait a week to see if it sprouts.

Also what I love about development is that with modern Docker/Kubernetes setups you can make the environment where your code runs pretty predictable. And with proper backups configured and backup restore testing you aren't really worried about losing the stuff you worked on for months. Meanwhile while farming you can't predict how much sun is gonna shine or how much rain you're gonna get. And you can't prepare for natural disasters which can come anytime and ruin your crops.

So I wonder if it's all just people who never loved software engineering and just went into it for money, and now that they have money after years of working they start looking for their true passion.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#73

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…

[dead]

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#74
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…

The push to increase production and leave nothing on the table is insidious and will turn every work environment, be it manual labor, design, programming or excel factory into shit.

You'll end up burn out and hating the job (no matter the job) if the company you work for doesn't give a considerable weight to the wellbeing of employees (at the percieved cost of productivity and raw revenue).

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#75
post #25
post #23

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. 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…

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.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#76
post #39
post #23

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. 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…

And the best way for Earth is we all migrate to Mars aboard Elon Musk's spaceship.

If you're going to live underground(and you'd have to on Mars) you might as well do it here, at the bottom of the ocean, or if you're feeling particularily ambitious - even on the moon. There is literally zero advantage to doing it on Mars, except for the achievement.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#77
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like carpentry, or electrical work, or concrete, or just about any of the trades. Any labor throughout human history.

If ypu do those for 15 years you are likely in management

Maybe in hacker news reality, not in the real world.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#78
post #23

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…

It would also be better for the earth if there were no cities and everyone went back to village farming and local communities. I also don't see that ever happening nor do I want to ive in a city.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#79

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…

I grew up in similar environment in rural central India and I (half)jokingly say farming was my first real job. We rarely planted rice, but I have vivid memory of helping my father plant the rice saplings in the muddy puddles in my farm. I am always skeptical of urban people wanting to move back to little villages to do farming. Farming is a back-breaking and a tough job. You are exposed to all the vagaries of nature…

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 said for downscaling rice farmers, can it? I mean, at best maybe the other rice farmers enjoy having them around.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#80
post #25
post #23

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. 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…

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.

That depends on the rural environment. Especially grazing lands, like north European coastal heathlands, may have been managed with controlled burns in between grazing for a thousand years, to the point that they have their own biodiversity, that may get lost if they are disused.
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