12 ms·

I Work with Suicidal Farmers

154 points by flannery 7y ago

temp99990 7y ago
I wish we tracked suicide rates and drug ODs as a nation like we track GDP.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fullshark 7y ago
  We don't?
  - temp99990 7y ago
    They are tracked but aren’t a “first class” statistic like GDP is as far as measuring the “health” of a nation is concerned.
    - creato 7y ago
      I think the issue you are pointing at is that you want people to care more about these kinds of statistics, and less about GDP. That's a very different and much harder problem to solve than the one implied by you first post (that we don't measure them in the first place).
      - temp99990 7y ago
        My wording is confusing. I’m aware these are tracked.
      - fullshark 7y ago
        When one side is in power, they point to the metrics that make things seem great, and when out of power, they do the reverse. Republicans in 2017 suddenly talked about how great stock returns / GDP / unemployment were doing when they spent 8 years saying they didn't reflect the true economy and the jobless rate was abominable. Now democrats are focusing on median income growth / GINI index / student loan default rates etc after saying everything was great for years. Statistics are just used as tools to accomplish policy goals and win arguments.
  - arkades 7y ago
    We do. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/resources.html https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/resources.htm...
    - protomyth 7y ago
      To add, the CDC does an amazing job of making the whole of mortality stats available with the fast take being at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm - they also do a weekly report
      - Donald 7y ago
        The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Twitter feed is similarly fascinating: https://twitter.com/cdcmmwr https://twitter.com/cdcmmwr
- chillacy 7y ago
  Businesses use tension metrics to make sure that their primary KPIs are still working, like new users signed up vs user retention after 180 days (to prevent the marketing department from going all in on unsustainable user “growth”). Perhaps we should do the same with GDP, since as income inequality grows it can continue to grow while suffering increases
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sodepressed 7y ago
I work with suicidal physicists and programmers. We're all women. The men aren't doing great either but that's because they're expected to succeed and are given a disproportionate amount of work. We're expected to fail, left out of meetings relevant to our duties, and wither into obscurity with the excuse "well I asked everybody" time and again, forgotten and excluded. But everybody has good intentions. God forbid I forget that
- caseyw 7y ago
  I was left out of important meetings, asked questions that no one answered and would get in trouble for not knowing something from a meeting I wasn’t invited to. Super fun.
- ng12 7y ago
  Who hires someone with the expectation of failure?
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    Somebody who knows they're making a diversity hire, generally (regardless of the actual quality of the candidate, which somebody making this decision probably never bothered to consider).
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    Project managers in stack ranked companies. edit - there is a vicious little set of incentives in certain corporate environments that almost guarantees bullying and fucked up mind games unless the manager is some kind of a saint. Mix stack ranking and any kind of external weighting on a manager and they will comply with the weighting by hiring the person they can get to fail the stack ranking so as not to screw with their project team. And unless this person is lucky enough to be oblivious, they have just entered hell.
  - sodepressed 7y ago
    We get hired because we're undeniably brilliant. But then we aren't actually welcome in the social fabric, which is more than 80% male. I've been on a few hiring panels and contrary to a sibling comment's implication, the hiring process is quite biased. Though progressive, the company doesn't have anything resembling diversity-aware hiring practices. "The best candidate gets the job" is the rule, but when "cultural fit" is a significant consideration in a heavily male dominated department, we continue to hire many more men than women.
seltzered_ 7y ago
Some criticism on the evangelism of the Farmer suicide problem in the US is mentioned in Farm to Taber 2.1 part 1 - 21m39 - https://www.farmtotaber.com/episodes/2019/1/29/fitness-culture-vs-health-interview-with-michelle-allison https://www.farmtotaber.com/episodes/2019/1/29/fitness-cultu... - "[The 2016 cdc study] counted a lot of farmworker suicides as farmer suicides...so what's really happening is there is a suicide epidemic in migrant farmworkers. Through the magic of data-fudging it became a rash of farmer suicides, and then through the magic of the farm lobby farmworker suicides became a federal opportunity for funding farmers. Who when they're in legitimate financial trouble already have a thing we all have called bankruptcy law..." Googling for the 2016 cdc farm suicide study reveals they have retracted the study back in June 2018: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-retracts-study-that-found-farmers-had-highest-suicide-rates-of-any-occupation/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-retracts-study-that-found-f... https://newfoodeconomy.org/farmer-suicide-crisis-cdc-study/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/farmer-suicide-crisis-cdc-study/ Sarah Taber had a recent twitter thread also questioning the therapy efforts as possibly ineffective if those with power in a farming community exert toxic traits: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1102961401507782658 https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1102961401507782658
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  Bankruptcy law is a solution to the financial problem of "owing money" but in the case of a farmer you also own the land and means of production, and bankruptcy means forced sales of it, and it effective destroys that lifestyle for you, forever (nobody is starting a farm from scratch these days).
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    I never thought about that part of it. As a programmer you can't really take away my means of making a living via liquidation of assets. But farmers and I imagine many other professions, this is a very different scenario. I have to think that they wouldn't want to remove someone's ability to pay their debts. But I also imagine that when you get to bankruptcy, it isn't about that anymore.
rmason 7y ago
The difference with farmers and other occupations is that there's such a strong emotional bond. The land has been in the family for generations. Failure is simply not an option. When the end comes some can't emotionally handle it. A steelworker or a coal miner may feel sadness at fifty that they have to start over, but they always saw the mill or mine as a necessary evil. The best option they had to provide for their family. I have a friend who told me the story of his great grandfather losing a piece of his farm in the depression. My friend said we waited eighty years but we've brought it back into the family where it has always belonged. He got into an auction with a neighbor and clearly overpaid but he was so joyful. Almost like he paid a ransom to get his own child back. But the rest of us better be grateful that they do it. The hours suck, the risk is high and the pay is low. If there wasn't such a strong emotional bond we'd pay a lot more for our food just to get people to do it.
- floren 7y ago
  Ah but this is HN. Do you know about the farm lobby? I hear it's big, and unlike the Silicon Valley lobbyists it's bad. Also Monsanto exists (well, they haven't been called Monsanto for some time, but whatever) so it's basically for the best if farmers kill themselves.
  - rexpop 7y ago
    Your lazy comment is in bad faith.
    - floren 7y ago
      The top-rated comment on this article, describing how obviously farmers aren't really committing suicide because a survey was bad, that's in bad faith.
      - dang 7y ago
        Perhaps, but please don't respond to bad comments with more bad comments. That only makes this place worse. The site guidelines point another way: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Maybe you don't owe another commenter better, but you owe this community better. And if you know some truth that others don't know, you owe the truth better, too: to help people understand it instead of discrediting it and giving them a reason to dismiss it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
katanaman 7y ago
“Dad, do you want to go to Oklahoma? We can spend some time shooting turkeys and feral pigs. It’d be good for you as well as me.” I was feeling sympathy for these people until I read the piece above. He may as well write something like: "Yeah, let's kill some wildlife, also we could give a beating to a sodomite or a nr, anything to make you feel better Dad"
- tathougies 7y ago
  Feral pigs are menaces and non-native species. We should thank the people that shoot and kill them. Most are eaten anyway, because -- if the ecosystem is healthy enough -- they're quite good. Turkey are native species, but hunting is highly regulated, and given the stiff punishment for poaching, it is doubtful the person in the article was attempting to poach. That being said, Turkey are hardly endangered; they're like pigeons. Also, equating hunting with hatred of 'sodomites' is just ignorance on your part.
- dmckeon 7y ago
  Feral hogs are a significant problem for farmers in more than a dozen US states, causing about $1.5 billion per year. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/wildlifedamage/operational-activities/feral-swine/sa-fs-history https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/wildlifedamage/ope... https://www.wildlifedepartment.com/feral-hogs-in-oklahoma https://www.wildlifedepartment.com/feral-hogs-in-oklahoma https://newsok.com/article/5580633/oklahoma-announces-a-record-harvest-of-feral-hogs-in-2017 https://newsok.com/article/5580633/oklahoma-announces-a-reco...
- MeltySmelty 7y ago
  lol, wow. which sanctuary city do you live in?
JackFr 7y ago
An ag banker I know, has had the conversations with customers explaining that they would be better off taking their equity, putting it in mutual funds and working as a greeter in WalMart. The problem is one of scale. If a small farmer is underleveraged, its simply not worth the time to farm. The return on equity is too low. If he levers up too much, then every season is literally betting the farm. (With the caveat that the size of the equity stake and rate of leverage vary very much from crop to crop. Grains are very different than fruits and vegetables)
Lowkeyloki 7y ago
Did anyone else listen to the audio version of this article? Is it a really good text-to-speech engine reading it, or is it a real person? I feel a little bad asking because I'm probably insulting a real VO artist by asking. The reasons I suspect that it's a machine are: 1. The voice sounds really familiar. 2. The person (or machine, but henceforth I'll just say person) read the names of the authors but never gave his own name. 3. The person had unusually long but consistent pauses between sentences. 4. The person read a few clauses strangely in a way that I don't think a real person, or at least a native English speaker, would have. The clauses were a little strangely worded, but the intent becomes clear as soon as you read the whole sentence. So although it's not impossible that a real person and native speaker would have gotten it wrong, they would have immediately reread the sentence with the correct inflection. 5. I can't imagine a real person reading such an emotional piece in such an unaffected manner. All that said, if it is text-to-speech, it's the best I've ever heard. But you can see how I feel bad about saying all this. It implies this is either a fantastic text-to-speech program or a questionable VO artist. If this was a real person and that person is reading this, I apologize. I mean no disrespect.
- LukeShu 7y ago
  "Audm" (audm.com), the service that provided the audio version, seems to be based around hiring human narrators.
  - Lowkeyloki 7y ago
    That's what I was afraid of. Thank you, though. I do feel super bad about it now.
    - csytan 7y ago
      How come? I think it'd be likely that there will eventually be a hybrid text-to-speech engine that is trained on the narrator, and can continue where they left off.
      - Lowkeyloki 7y ago
stevespang 7y ago
Put all your patients on Ketamine and get some rest (and success !)
uxp100 7y ago
There is a theory about the suicide rate among farmers (which has always been high) that I'm not sure I completely believe, but I don't think it's nonsense. It goes something like: Farmers (well, I'm speaking mainly about livestock farmers here) spend their lives dealing with death, and doing cost/benefit analysis. When it's time to send an animal to slaughter, they do so. When the vet says some expensive procedure is not likely to work, they kill the animal, even though emotional relationships are built with what is also their capital. They have the weapons to deal with it. So when a farm is failing, and they are in late middle age, they are more comfortable than average saying, ok, I gave it a try, it didn't work out, I can't start over doing something else. The skill I have spent my life learning is when to give up, and I've got the tool to do it.
- ciconia 7y ago
  > even though emotional relationships are built with what is also their capital Living among farmers (France) I can confidently say they have no emotional attachment to their animals. For them it's just raw material.
  - GalacticDomin8r 7y ago
    The emotional de-attachment is needed for many people I expect. I once raised a small herd of bottle calves. The day I sold them to market is the day I dropped any dream of raising livestock.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    Odd, some of them have the paradoxical statement that 'they love their livestock'.
- mreome 7y ago
  That really only seems to apply to livestock farmers. It seems more likely that it has to do with the all encompassing nature of that kind of life. A farm is a business, home, career, lifestyle, and culture. If something so central to who you are fails with no hope of recovery, what do you do?
- 7y ago
agumonkey 7y ago
Few years ago there was a documentary about the rise of banks in France during the 20th century. One segment talked about country side spread of agencies, with farmes being interviewed. It was tears, struggle and borderline suicide thoughts on tape. Just like today. I don't get how the thing that gives us most of our food has always, it seems, been so harsh.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  The thing about agriculture is there is /a lot/ of labor supply. While those with the appropriate degrees and institutional knowledge may do it better essentially anyone with fertile land is capable of subsistence farming. Wealth is fundamentally something produced - absent generations of labor and progress things tend to be fairly bleak by default unless they are exceptionally fortunate.
Angela_Marshall 7y ago
Bless their souls. Our farmers are treated terribly along with the animals. It's good to see a man doing good work for them.
helloindia 7y ago
Somewhat related. Farmer Suicide occurring from unmanageable debt, is also a well-known phenomenon in India,
mbfg 7y ago
The problem with farming that is unique is that you can't get out. You can't get out without making horrendous choices about animals that you probably love. You're probably struggling mightily and so the farm has taken on a significant amount of degradation that is hard to explain to the future buyers. Things are probably broken all over the place, things are in desperate need of repair and you live with them because you have to, you have nothing. A farm is not like a poor person's house being in disrepair, a farm is a massive property that is constantly depreciating with no funds to stave off issues. How do you invite people in to even begin to solve the problem. You don't own the farm, the farm owns you

154 points by flannery 7y ago

temp99990 7y ago

I wish we tracked suicide rates and drug ODs as a nation like we track GDP.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 7y ago
We don't?
- temp99990 7y ago
  They are tracked but aren’t a “first class” statistic like GDP is as far as measuring the “health” of a nation is concerned.
  - creato 7y ago
    I think the issue you are pointing at is that you want people to care more about these kinds of statistics, and less about GDP. That's a very different and much harder problem to solve than the one implied by you first post (that we don't measure them in the first place).
    - temp99990 7y ago
      My wording is confusing. I’m aware these are tracked.
    - fullshark 7y ago
      When one side is in power, they point to the metrics that make things seem great, and when out of power, they do the reverse. Republicans in 2017 suddenly talked about how great stock returns / GDP / unemployment were doing when they spent 8 years saying they didn't reflect the true economy and the jobless rate was abominable. Now democrats are focusing on median income growth / GINI index / student loan default rates etc after saying everything was great for years. Statistics are just used as tools to accomplish policy goals and win arguments.
- arkades 7y ago
  We do. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/resources.html https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/suicide/resources.htm...
  - protomyth 7y ago
    To add, the CDC does an amazing job of making the whole of mortality stats available with the fast take being at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm - they also do a weekly report
    - Donald 7y ago
      The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Twitter feed is similarly fascinating: https://twitter.com/cdcmmwr https://twitter.com/cdcmmwr
chillacy 7y ago
Businesses use tension metrics to make sure that their primary KPIs are still working, like new users signed up vs user retention after 180 days (to prevent the marketing department from going all in on unsustainable user “growth”). Perhaps we should do the same with GDP, since as income inequality grows it can continue to grow while suffering increases

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sodepressed 7y ago

I work with suicidal physicists and programmers. We're all women. The men aren't doing great either but that's because they're expected to succeed and are given a disproportionate amount of work. We're expected to fail, left out of meetings relevant to our duties, and wither into obscurity with the excuse "well I asked everybody" time and again, forgotten and excluded. But everybody has good intentions. God forbid I forget that

caseyw 7y ago
I was left out of important meetings, asked questions that no one answered and would get in trouble for not knowing something from a meeting I wasn’t invited to. Super fun.
ng12 7y ago
Who hires someone with the expectation of failure?
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Somebody who knows they're making a diversity hire, generally (regardless of the actual quality of the candidate, which somebody making this decision probably never bothered to consider).
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  Project managers in stack ranked companies. edit - there is a vicious little set of incentives in certain corporate environments that almost guarantees bullying and fucked up mind games unless the manager is some kind of a saint. Mix stack ranking and any kind of external weighting on a manager and they will comply with the weighting by hiring the person they can get to fail the stack ranking so as not to screw with their project team. And unless this person is lucky enough to be oblivious, they have just entered hell.
- sodepressed 7y ago
  We get hired because we're undeniably brilliant. But then we aren't actually welcome in the social fabric, which is more than 80% male. I've been on a few hiring panels and contrary to a sibling comment's implication, the hiring process is quite biased. Though progressive, the company doesn't have anything resembling diversity-aware hiring practices. "The best candidate gets the job" is the rule, but when "cultural fit" is a significant consideration in a heavily male dominated department, we continue to hire many more men than women.

seltzered_ 7y ago

Some criticism on the evangelism of the Farmer suicide problem in the US is mentioned in Farm to Taber 2.1 part 1 - 21m39 - https://www.farmtotaber.com/episodes/2019/1/29/fitness-culture-vs-health-interview-with-michelle-allison https://www.farmtotaber.com/episodes/2019/1/29/fitness-cultu... - "[The 2016 cdc study] counted a lot of farmworker suicides as farmer suicides...so what's really happening is there is a suicide epidemic in migrant farmworkers. Through the magic of data-fudging it became a rash of farmer suicides, and then through the magic of the farm lobby farmworker suicides became a federal opportunity for funding farmers. Who when they're in legitimate financial trouble already have a thing we all have called bankruptcy law..." Googling for the 2016 cdc farm suicide study reveals they have retracted the study back in June 2018: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-retracts-study-that-found-farmers-had-highest-suicide-rates-of-any-occupation/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-retracts-study-that-found-f... https://newfoodeconomy.org/farmer-suicide-crisis-cdc-study/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/farmer-suicide-crisis-cdc-study/ Sarah Taber had a recent twitter thread also questioning the therapy efforts as possibly ineffective if those with power in a farming community exert toxic traits: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1102961401507782658 https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1102961401507782658

throwaway2048 7y ago
Bankruptcy law is a solution to the financial problem of "owing money" but in the case of a farmer you also own the land and means of production, and bankruptcy means forced sales of it, and it effective destroys that lifestyle for you, forever (nobody is starting a farm from scratch these days).
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  I never thought about that part of it. As a programmer you can't really take away my means of making a living via liquidation of assets. But farmers and I imagine many other professions, this is a very different scenario. I have to think that they wouldn't want to remove someone's ability to pay their debts. But I also imagine that when you get to bankruptcy, it isn't about that anymore.

rmason 7y ago

The difference with farmers and other occupations is that there's such a strong emotional bond. The land has been in the family for generations. Failure is simply not an option. When the end comes some can't emotionally handle it. A steelworker or a coal miner may feel sadness at fifty that they have to start over, but they always saw the mill or mine as a necessary evil. The best option they had to provide for their family. I have a friend who told me the story of his great grandfather losing a piece of his farm in the depression. My friend said we waited eighty years but we've brought it back into the family where it has always belonged. He got into an auction with a neighbor and clearly overpaid but he was so joyful. Almost like he paid a ransom to get his own child back. But the rest of us better be grateful that they do it. The hours suck, the risk is high and the pay is low. If there wasn't such a strong emotional bond we'd pay a lot more for our food just to get people to do it.

floren 7y ago
Ah but this is HN. Do you know about the farm lobby? I hear it's big, and unlike the Silicon Valley lobbyists it's bad. Also Monsanto exists (well, they haven't been called Monsanto for some time, but whatever) so it's basically for the best if farmers kill themselves.
- rexpop 7y ago
  Your lazy comment is in bad faith.
  - floren 7y ago
    The top-rated comment on this article, describing how obviously farmers aren't really committing suicide because a survey was bad, that's in bad faith.
    - dang 7y ago
      Perhaps, but please don't respond to bad comments with more bad comments. That only makes this place worse. The site guidelines point another way: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Maybe you don't owe another commenter better, but you owe this community better. And if you know some truth that others don't know, you owe the truth better, too: to help people understand it instead of discrediting it and giving them a reason to dismiss it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

katanaman 7y ago

“Dad, do you want to go to Oklahoma? We can spend some time shooting turkeys and feral pigs. It’d be good for you as well as me.” I was feeling sympathy for these people until I read the piece above. He may as well write something like: "Yeah, let's kill some wildlife, also we could give a beating to a sodomite or a nr, anything to make you feel better Dad"

tathougies 7y ago
Feral pigs are menaces and non-native species. We should thank the people that shoot and kill them. Most are eaten anyway, because -- if the ecosystem is healthy enough -- they're quite good. Turkey are native species, but hunting is highly regulated, and given the stiff punishment for poaching, it is doubtful the person in the article was attempting to poach. That being said, Turkey are hardly endangered; they're like pigeons. Also, equating hunting with hatred of 'sodomites' is just ignorance on your part.
dmckeon 7y ago
Feral hogs are a significant problem for farmers in more than a dozen US states, causing about $1.5 billion per year. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/wildlifedamage/operational-activities/feral-swine/sa-fs-history https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/wildlifedamage/ope... https://www.wildlifedepartment.com/feral-hogs-in-oklahoma https://www.wildlifedepartment.com/feral-hogs-in-oklahoma https://newsok.com/article/5580633/oklahoma-announces-a-record-harvest-of-feral-hogs-in-2017 https://newsok.com/article/5580633/oklahoma-announces-a-reco...
MeltySmelty 7y ago
lol, wow. which sanctuary city do you live in?

JackFr 7y ago

An ag banker I know, has had the conversations with customers explaining that they would be better off taking their equity, putting it in mutual funds and working as a greeter in WalMart. The problem is one of scale. If a small farmer is underleveraged, its simply not worth the time to farm. The return on equity is too low. If he levers up too much, then every season is literally betting the farm. (With the caveat that the size of the equity stake and rate of leverage vary very much from crop to crop. Grains are very different than fruits and vegetables)

Lowkeyloki 7y ago

Did anyone else listen to the audio version of this article? Is it a really good text-to-speech engine reading it, or is it a real person? I feel a little bad asking because I'm probably insulting a real VO artist by asking. The reasons I suspect that it's a machine are: 1. The voice sounds really familiar. 2. The person (or machine, but henceforth I'll just say person) read the names of the authors but never gave his own name. 3. The person had unusually long but consistent pauses between sentences. 4. The person read a few clauses strangely in a way that I don't think a real person, or at least a native English speaker, would have. The clauses were a little strangely worded, but the intent becomes clear as soon as you read the whole sentence. So although it's not impossible that a real person and native speaker would have gotten it wrong, they would have immediately reread the sentence with the correct inflection. 5. I can't imagine a real person reading such an emotional piece in such an unaffected manner. All that said, if it is text-to-speech, it's the best I've ever heard. But you can see how I feel bad about saying all this. It implies this is either a fantastic text-to-speech program or a questionable VO artist. If this was a real person and that person is reading this, I apologize. I mean no disrespect.

LukeShu 7y ago
"Audm" (audm.com), the service that provided the audio version, seems to be based around hiring human narrators.
- Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  That's what I was afraid of. Thank you, though. I do feel super bad about it now.
  - csytan 7y ago
    How come? I think it'd be likely that there will eventually be a hybrid text-to-speech engine that is trained on the narrator, and can continue where they left off.
    - Lowkeyloki 7y ago

stevespang 7y ago

Put all your patients on Ketamine and get some rest (and success !)

uxp100 7y ago

There is a theory about the suicide rate among farmers (which has always been high) that I'm not sure I completely believe, but I don't think it's nonsense. It goes something like: Farmers (well, I'm speaking mainly about livestock farmers here) spend their lives dealing with death, and doing cost/benefit analysis. When it's time to send an animal to slaughter, they do so. When the vet says some expensive procedure is not likely to work, they kill the animal, even though emotional relationships are built with what is also their capital. They have the weapons to deal with it. So when a farm is failing, and they are in late middle age, they are more comfortable than average saying, ok, I gave it a try, it didn't work out, I can't start over doing something else. The skill I have spent my life learning is when to give up, and I've got the tool to do it.

ciconia 7y ago
> even though emotional relationships are built with what is also their capital Living among farmers (France) I can confidently say they have no emotional attachment to their animals. For them it's just raw material.
- GalacticDomin8r 7y ago
  The emotional de-attachment is needed for many people I expect. I once raised a small herd of bottle calves. The day I sold them to market is the day I dropped any dream of raising livestock.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  Odd, some of them have the paradoxical statement that 'they love their livestock'.
mreome 7y ago
That really only seems to apply to livestock farmers. It seems more likely that it has to do with the all encompassing nature of that kind of life. A farm is a business, home, career, lifestyle, and culture. If something so central to who you are fails with no hope of recovery, what do you do?
7y ago

agumonkey 7y ago

Few years ago there was a documentary about the rise of banks in France during the 20th century. One segment talked about country side spread of agencies, with farmes being interviewed. It was tears, struggle and borderline suicide thoughts on tape. Just like today. I don't get how the thing that gives us most of our food has always, it seems, been so harsh.

Nasrudith 7y ago
The thing about agriculture is there is /a lot/ of labor supply. While those with the appropriate degrees and institutional knowledge may do it better essentially anyone with fertile land is capable of subsistence farming. Wealth is fundamentally something produced - absent generations of labor and progress things tend to be fairly bleak by default unless they are exceptionally fortunate.

Angela_Marshall 7y ago

Bless their souls. Our farmers are treated terribly along with the animals. It's good to see a man doing good work for them.

helloindia 7y ago

Somewhat related. Farmer Suicide occurring from unmanageable debt, is also a well-known phenomenon in India,

mbfg 7y ago

The problem with farming that is unique is that you can't get out. You can't get out without making horrendous choices about animals that you probably love. You're probably struggling mightily and so the farm has taken on a significant amount of degradation that is hard to explain to the future buyers. Things are probably broken all over the place, things are in desperate need of repair and you live with them because you have to, you have nothing. A farm is not like a poor person's house being in disrepair, a farm is a massive property that is constantly depreciating with no funds to stave off issues. How do you invite people in to even begin to solve the problem. You don't own the farm, the farm owns you