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I grew up in a rural community where farming was basically the only industry. It's easy to talk about how awesome it is when you basically are selling insanely
by JPKab 9y ago
I grew up in a rural community where farming was basically the only industry. It's easy to talk about how awesome it is when you basically are selling insanely overpriced boutique goods (organic, free-range, etc) to yuppies who are willing to pay triple for their calories. Once enough people do this, the prices fall and you're just another farmer, scraping by.
I grew up working on farms. It's not romantic to me in any way. Being outside is nice, but there's a reason the kids doing this grew up in suburbs and cities: they have no idea what agriculture really involves when you have to achieve economies of scale to make it remotely profitable.
- andyisageek 9y agoI also grew up on a farm... in Maine. It did instill a work ethic that I find it difficult to teach to my own children. But I always joke with people and say it is a great place to visit and a great place to be from. Not so much a great place to actually be.
- kimburgess 9y ago> It is a great place to visit and a great place to be from. Not so much a great place to actually be. I'll definitely echo this. I grew up on a farm / nature refuge in Australia. It's beautiful to go back to, but I could not live there again. My family hovers around the poverty line, work long, hard hours, and are completely at the mercy of the climate and other difficult to control external factors for their lively hood. Combine this with the isolation, poor (or non-existent) community and education resources, complete void of cultural events and niche activities that require higher population densities. It's nowhere near as idyllic as most people make out. I now live inner city. When it's nice weather I can drive an hour, go hiking, rock climbing or exploring. During day-to-day life I have everything I need within walking distance. I can live spontaneously. Myself and my partner are talking about children and I'm looking forward to raising them in a city where they can access whatever interests they like. Once thing I will agree on though is: modern suburban life is a dystopic hellscape. It literally combines the worst of both lifestyles.
- roadnottaken 9y agoGood points, but I totally disagree about the suburbs. We live on a quiet cul de sac in a very suburban neighborhood. We’re 20 minutes from mountains, trails, beach, schools, stores, and work. It’s safe and friendly and our kids play with other kids in the street every day. Seems like a pretty sweet compromise to me, but YMMV.
- tspike 9y agoTo each his own. To me, the utter dependence on automobiles, the blatantly wasteful lifestyle and the oppression of HOAs feels claustrophobic, dissonant and excessive. I feel depressed when I have to battle traffic to get access to nature.
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoSomething I never considered when I was younger was how much these things are a spectrum and that there is no bright dividing line between many of these choices. As an example: I'm living in what's definitely the suburbs (VA Beach), but within easy walking distance of the local coffee shop, groceries, my kids school, etc. We don't have an HOA, but know a lot of our neighbors. I have a car, but don't use it much b/c of both location and that I work from home.
- d10r 9y agoWhat is HOA?
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y agoI believe in this context it means Home Owners Association[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association
- aplummer 9y agoIt can vary a lot, town planning goes from meticulously fine tuned for successful community, to max number of houses and fewer services for property developer profit.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoMeh, still better than the tourism based places. At least with a farm you're busy all year. With tourism you're under employed half the year and shooting up something to kill the time.
- LoonyBalloony 9y ago"shooting up something to kill the time." I like FPS games to. ;-)
- Apocryphon 9y agoWell yeah- the truism that a hobby turned into a livelihood makes it less fun applies to everything. Coders talk about it all of the time.
- oedenfield 9y agoI can't upvote this enough. There are aspects of agribusiness that are great (built in gym, outdoors, teaching work ethic to children, etc.) but there are other aspects like all the "vendors" you work with (seed supplier, livestock feed supplier, equipment companies, etc.) all sell to you (the farmer) at retail prices but you ALWAYS sell at wholesale. They set their prices to the market, you take what the market gives you. Unless you can be Cargil or ADM, prepare to scrape by.
- why15characters 9y ago> It's easy to talk about how awesome it is when you basically are selling insanely overpriced boutique goods (organic, free-range, etc) to yuppies who are willing to pay triple for their calories. Most of the hipster microgreen crowd aren't even making their money that way, they are making it by scamming other hipsters into trying to do that by acting like anyone can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling $10/pound lettuce to hipster restaurants. There's obviously a very limited number of restaurants in the "overcharge people for local food" market to sell to. But you don't need to do that crap. You can sell normal vegetables for a normal price to normal people and make a perfectly reasonable living. >Once enough people do this, the prices fall and you're just another farmer, scraping by. The reason most farms are "scraping by" is the same reason most restaurants fail, and most programmers can't handle fizzbuzz. Most people are simply incompetent, regardless of their occupation. Every farmer I see complaining about money is wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of them are driving around in $80,000 pickup trucks while complaining about how poor they are. >Being outside is nice, but there's a reason the kids doing this grew up in suburbs and cities: they have no idea what agriculture really involves when you have to achieve economies of scale to make it remotely profitable. You don't have to achieve economies of scale to be remotely profitable. Not every farm has to be a corn+soybean rotation.
- bogomipz 9y ago>"Most of the hipster microgreen crowd aren't even making their money that way, they are making it by scamming other hipsters into trying to do that by acting like anyone can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling $10/pound lettuce to hipster restaurants." Can you elaborate on this? What exactly is the scam? How does the scam work?
- lancebeet 9y agoThere are lots of youtube channels (and similar) promoting this idea. These channels can generate a lot of ad revenue for their creators. I'm assuming that's what they're referring to.
- 9y ago
- driverdan 9y agoI wish I could upvote you twice. For some reason many people who have never farmed have this romantic vision of it. In reality farming is extremely hard work and requires a wide range of skills and knowledge to be successful. If you're good at it you can make decent money but someone who's only worked desk jobs is not going to be good, at least not for a while.
- CydeWeys 9y agoNot only is it extremely hard work, but you can't ever get a break from it. There's a bunch of work that needs to be done every single day (things like milking the cows). If you're someone who likes taking vacations, just know that it becomes a lot harder when you've got a farm. Forget about travel entirely during the growing season. Hell, I don't even have any pets because I travel frequently enough that they'd be a hassle. I can't imagine how I'd deal with an entire farm in these circumstances. I barely keep one houseplant alive as it is, not from lack of care when I'm home, but from lack of care when I'm gone.
- MAGZine 9y agoDepends where you live, and what you farm. In the case of e.g. cereal crops in the north, there are 4-6 months where you can do little beyond some maintenance, buying/selling equipment, planning next year's crop, etc. that means there is plenty of time for vacations. You are right that during seeding or harvest (especially), all bets for travel are off. But, it is incorrect to imply that because you farm, you ought to kiss vacations good-bye.
- CydeWeys 9y agoAnimals need taking care of every day year-round. There's very few homesteaders who don't have at least some egg-laying chickens. I have a feeling you're thinking more about industrial-scale monoculture farmers, but that's not what the linked article is talking about.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
- userbinator 9y agoI grew up working on farms. It's not romantic to me in any way. Being outside is nice, but there's a reason the kids doing this grew up in suburbs and cities: they have no idea what agriculture really involves when you have to achieve economies of scale to make it remotely profitable. I suspect it's a "the grass is always greener in the neighbour's lawn... or in this case pasture" effect.
- Pica_soO 9y agoBeeing outside for long stretches might sound healthy, but at the end of day gives you skin-cancer. Source of Information: Scar over my eye, where the doctor cut out the summers harvest of pesticide resistant weeds in uv-rays.
- pdfernhout 9y agoSkin cancer is generally much easier to treat though than all the other internal cancers people can get from vitamin D deficiency... Also, something to think about: http://dermatologytimes.modernmedicine.com/dermatology-times/news/clinical/dermatology/office-workers-greater-risk-melanoma-study-shows http://dermatologytimes.modernmedicine.com/dermatology-times... "Researchers at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR) have revealed that they are finding more instances of melanoma in office workers than people who work outdoors..."
- plessthanpt05 9y agoI might have missed it from just quickly looking at that source, but what do they think is causing this increase of melanoma in office workers?
- pdfernhout 9y agoFrom other things I've read, probably vitamin D deficiency form lack of sunlight is a factor. Of course, there can be too much of a good thing too... Intermittent sun exposure has also been blamed rather than frequent to promote tanning. Lack of exercise and stress from indoor jobs may play a part as well in increased cancer risk in general.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Once enough people do this, the prices fall and you're just another farmer, scraping by I suspect these individuals will find something new to popularise and produce at high margin.
- pajaroide 9y agoIf I did it someday I wouldn't be thinking about making money, just being self-sufficient and growing enough food for me and my family. If I could sell some that's great but that's not the objective.
- agumonkey 9y agograss is greener. Kids in isolated tribes or areas are running away from their parents lifestyle as fast as possible. They don't see the beauty in the old ways and are unable to see the lies in modern cities, too much shiny. Surely nothing is perfect but modern society has reached a point of diminishing returns IMO. Somatic and mental health issues, absurd jobs, absurd structures influenced by remote financial games; etc etc Whenever I see some guy that bought a piece of land and fixed an old barn I get dreams. All I'd need a bit more mileage in ceramics and electronics so I can get just enough modern science, the rest is already there.
- mrguyorama 9y agoI grew up in a small rural shithole. I don't share the same positive outlook you see. What did I see? I saw poverty. I saw far too much land not bringing enough money into the area to even sustain it. Schools struggled because they didn't have money, businesses suffered because nobody had money, the lack of businesses meant a lack of work. In fact, entire sectors of the economy up there don't exist. As I was coming of age, I realized I was pretty good at solving problems, working with logic, and writing code. The problem? The one software development job for hundreds of miles paid $9/hour. There is no money in the small towns. In fact, even now that small rural town is heavily subsidized by the one or two metro areas in the state. If an area can't bring in the tax dollars and other money to run the local economy, it degrades. When the only influx of anything is welfare dollars, how is that a beautiful way? It wasn't beautiful sixty years ago either. Stories of my parent's generation are similar stories of poverty and struggle and the occasional running away to live an almost comfortable life closer to the city. The "work ethic" often lauded by those who pine for these times seems to be the willingness to work far too much for far too little.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago> Once enough people do this, the prices fall and you're just another farmer, scraping by. You’re assuming that the bulk of the market always has to be cheap commodity goods. But the idea behind the artisanal movement is that both sides of the market will change. More small producers will produce more high quality goods and more consumers will pay high prices to buy them. Both sides need to grow in synchrony. Maybe you can argue the dominance of low quality commodity foods is inevitable. I’d love to see that argument.
- naavis 9y agoThere is a huge number of people who can barely afford to buy cheap food now, let alone expensive "artisanal" food.
- FussyZeus 9y agoThere's also a huge number of people (myself included) who can afford (and do afford) to buy expensive quality stuff. I don't hold it against science and bio-tech for bringing high yield and disease resistant crops to market; that shit will help us feed the whole planet economically. Doesn't mean I can't also enjoy organic, non-altered food in my own home. I get annoyed with this attitude so many people have about these things, that somehow we can either feed the whole planet economically or have ritzy well-to-do people buy organic kale. We can do both very easily.
- mygo 9y agoThere is a huge number of people who can barely afford to buy cheap laptops now, let alone expensive MacBooks. Doesn’t change the fact that Apple is the most profitable firm.
- d10r 9y agoIt's also a matter of priorities, I'm currently "poor" by the definition of the (western) country I live in, but can afford quality food by choosing to prioritize it.
- 9y ago
- yuhong 9y agoBut in the long term, even local farming is probably a better idea than the current debt-based economy that depends on imported goods from for example China, especially when even central farming with long distance shipping of foods has its costs.
- auvrw 9y agothe farm in my family indirectly exports some crops to China (as in crops go to a port which takes them to China): the import/export relationship is not one-way. it (China) is a large country by population, and while that's got to be one of the factors driving economic growth --- steel industry and various forms of tech and manufacturing (rise of ODMs, etc.) --- now that the government is increasingly (indirectly) opting into the IMF, there are also a lot of people to feed. debt can be viewed as another word for "relationship." and it's cool in some ways, yet in other ways kind of a shame: debt from the United States is, to some degree, buying into the military-industrial complex. valuing China's money is, in part, condescending to a rather selective perspective on human rights. hopefully the guanxi flows to the best in each rather than the worst. i don't pretend to understand the international economy. however, with the sort of logistics enabled by modern communications technology, i suspect that it's a lot more feasible to completely pack one large barge with a variety of goods than it used to be, making for lower-cost shipping than one might expect.
- yuhong 9y agoI am talking about all goods not just food, and not claiming there are zero exports either. And yes, part of the reason we got off the gold standard was military spending. Even now I like to mention that the more NSA/FBI spends, the more money is printed using government debt.
- spraak 9y ago> they have no idea what agriculture really involves Well, no. They have no idea what it involves for that type of scale, but to say they have no idea at all (about their operating scale) seems to just show your hurt feelings about growing up that way.
- dailyvijeos 9y agoMy mom’s family were Dust Bowl refugees, and my grandfather had to hustle to not starve to death. On a lighter note, check out this Canadian using a large backyard as a profitable farm: https://youtu.be/KO-OuqbR3EE https://youtu.be/KO-OuqbR3EE Here’s also a working Swedish homestead/farm (that’s being threated by the uncertainty of oil/mineral extraction): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7GkLSNBmds1DZit_oHk-Fg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7GkLSNBmds1DZit_oHk-Fg