25 ms·

Farmers always worked from home

113 points by artpi 5y ago

pueblito 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TaupeRanger 5y ago
  A farmer on Hacker News? Please tell me more.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    Well, I start my day by checking crypto prices. I eat my coffee and toast as I unwrap the new shipment of 3090's...
    - hundchenkatze 5y ago
      I think mining crypto currencies makes you a miner, not a farmer.
      - blackbear_ 5y ago
        But they manage a server farm, not a server mine.
  - devwastaken 5y ago
    Also come from farmers. Horses. Hay costs are through the roof because drought and heat, vets are expensive, far and few between. Less demand than ever, and everything is expensive. Glad I'm not in it as much anymore. Would like to be out of it entirely but #family and "Local only" software work half the country away don't mix. The others that operate the farm nowadays are absolutely swamped. Not enough money to do it full time so they work other full time jobs.
    - hycaria 5y ago
      Where and what kind of horses ? In europe there's a sport horse shortage I swear. Prices are through the roof !
  - flavius29663 5y ago
    They must be. Remember the farmers "hacking" their tractors with Ukrainian firmware, so they can fix their own John Deer machines?
  - gifwithaj 5y ago
    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 specific soil and weather conditions. Tractors are largely self-driving along with a host of technology to rival a race car and harvesters give live feedback on the quality and quantity of grain so that farmers can make decisions about what to do with the grain- sell immediately, store, or take to a specialized storage facility to dry. Crops are rotated seasonally to minimize pests and optimize soil quality, sometimes on complex multi-year patterns of cover crops, cash crops, spring harvests, etc. Underground "tiling" is installed to speed the flow of water away from low-lying sections of fields to maintain consistent soil moisture across fields on rolling hills. And the futures, options, insurance and debt financing decisions to maintain stable income in the face of unpredictable weather and commodity prices rivals what any investment banker in Manhattan is doing. And that's just for commodity grain producers, meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables have their own unique uses of cutting edge science and technology. A group of farmers in Iowa sitting at a conference about managing soil nitrogen are likely leveraging far more real science and tech than a group of web developers in the bay discussing the latest updates to React.
    - cardosof 5y ago
      Thank you for this comment. The internet as a whole needs more of this so we all stop thinking tech and innovation mean a smaller gadget, a new frontend or a VR/AR app.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      >"are likely leveraging far more real science and tech than a group of web developers in the bay discussing the latest updates to React." +1000. For some of those their sense of entitlement to be an "expert" in unrelated field outstrips the actual capacity.
    - TaupeRanger 5y ago
      Yikes...accusing me of something akin to racism seems harsh. I am a musician myself, and am always curious about what brings people from other disciplines to HN. Apologies if I caused any offense.
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    There are many of us. https://mulligan.farm https://mulligan.farm
  - giantg2 5y ago
    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%)
  - chucksta 5y ago
    What is surprising about that? Farmers were are a driving force for right to repair
    - TaupeRanger 5y ago
      Haven't seen much talk about farming here at all. It was just a curious question.
  - pueblito 5y ago
    I’m a farmer in southern Colorado. Currently we grow marijuana and potatoes. I’m on HN because because I’m a long time Linux user (20+ years) and free software advocate and this is where a lot of the old bofhs still lurk
- bachmeier 5y ago
  I grew up on a farm. I remember having conversations with other farm kids complaining about boredom during certain parts of the year. They had literally nothing to do for a few weeks several times a year. During the winter, which was long in North Dakota, there was basically nothing for a farmer (as opposed to a rancher) to do. They would do things of little value to pass the time, maybe they'd overhaul an engine if it was needed, but for the most part they could have watched TV all day if they wanted - and many of them did that or went to the bar. 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.
defaultname 5y ago
What possible value is there in holding a farmer's lifestyle as a model or contrast for knowledge workers? Are work/life balance concerns not a problem because someone somewhere collects eggs at 5am and vegetables at 8pm? Further, suicides and other mental health issues are endemic among farmers. And I'm pretty sure work-life balance is an endless concern for those so engaged.
- randomdata 5y ago
  As a farmer and WFH veteran of the software industry for 20 years, I think there are some decent parallels. I’m not sure the article expresses them well.
  - enumjorge 5y ago
    As someone who knows nothing about farming, those two seem so different in my mind. I’d love to hear your take on what the similarities are.
nonameiguess 5y ago
> 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 plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them.
- screye 5y ago
  > 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
  - watwut 5y ago
    Where do you have less then 10% of US population being slaves from? I found 18 percent of the total population in 1790, or roughly one in every six people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-population-us-1790-1880/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-... And based on what I know, it then went up due to cotton boom.
    - screye 5y ago
      You're correct that it seems to have peaked around 18%, but mostly hovered between 10-18%. It sat around 15% during the civil war. Note that these numbers do not include native Americans, who constituted between 1-3 million themselves, since the census didn't count them. Considering them as part of the total should indeed bring the numbers under 10%. Whether that is fair or not is up to the reader :) I still maintain that the majority of the people working on farms were most likely white. This is especially true since many states did not have slaves at all. I will admit that it is likely, that the most gruelling work on the field was given to the slaves.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
I think the problem is, the work (on computers) is never done. It takes months for me to say, "well, I got that wheat harvested" (in computer terms). There's always some more bullshit, so you can't just step away; more is always waiting, and you're always blocking someone somehow. The way we make money digitally does not map to a practical, dynamic life. We need to re-structure what "work" is, what it is we are trying to accomplish, and how.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  The same if true on a farm. There's always something to do. It appears to me that it's even more true on a farm - the list of things to do is never-ending and many are tightly constrained by season and weather. At least with software dev, we can get up and walk away without a crop rotting or livestock starving or being eaten by wolves. Plow a field. Harvest something. Sheer the lambs. Fix the irrigation. Repair a tractor. Update the books. Apply for government grants. Fix a fence.
- lasagnaphil 5y ago
  It's not that the work is never done, it's just that most of what we really work on computers is actually made-up bullshit and doesn't really connect to producing actual material things. (You earn money for it though, but money is as immaterial as it gets... and then you get to spend the majority of it on rent, education, healthcare, and various services, which are also all immaterial things.) Actual production seemed to have disappeared in today's neoliberal societies: they're either relegated to the Third World, or automated enough for not that many people to participate in. But the twist is: the nostalgia of productive "down-to-earth" work now becomes a captivating force, but that is exactly what the current system wants to provide you with the fantasy of work.
barrenko 5y ago
Watch Clarkson's Farm and then try again.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  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 silliness, it was plainly obvious it was a lot of hard work and long hours. All for a few hundred GBP profit at the end of the season. Yes, you read that correctly - the grain (the farm's primary output) only provided a tiny profit for all the work that went into it.
  - mschild 5y ago
    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.
    - arethuza 5y ago
      I think the whole point of the show is that Clarkson makes mistakes and then has to be corrected by sensible people who do know what they are doing. Clearly it was planned this way but I thought it worked really well.
kubb 5y ago
You could watch somebody work 16 hours, and totally like the idea, but you yourself of course would be too broken and debilitated by your internet access to do the same. But if you did, you'd be happy, you just know it. A simpler life, fruits of your labor and such.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
And farmers also had pretty crappy lives too. If I gotta be in an office 8 hours a day so I can eat deep fried Chinese food, have a car, and live in a nice apartment, so be it. Better than eating half assed food on a farm on top of meagre wages.
sriram_sun 5y ago
I wonder where farm workers are from? :). My point is that almost all farm workers are at least temporarily displaced from their homes.
Tade0 5y ago
Hailing from Poland (like the author) I see this write-up as a yet another manifestation of the toxic culture of overwork prevalent in this country. I lived like that during the first years of working remotely and it's both inefficient and unhealthy.
corty 5y ago
The entire premise of the article is untrue. Larger farms always had paid or unpaid laborers who where not "the Farmer" but still farmers. With the industrialisation this tendency increased as mom&pop farms got fewer and average farm size increased. In the whole eastern block, private small farms were absent or an exception, the rule was the kolkhoz model, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landwirtschaftliche_Produktionsgenossenschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landwirtschaftliche_Produktion... Farmers were employees with regular work time, fields of employment like operating machinery, milking or tending lifestock. The author ignores all this and draws conclusions from a mostly-wrong stereotype.
supermatt 5y ago
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
- r3trohack3r 5y ago
  This. As a remote software engineer, I empathize with folks who haven’t optimized for their home to be their day-to-day. I couldn’t imagine spendings lockdown in an SF Apartment. I spent lockdown in a 3k sq. foot home. I have a floating desk and a panasonic toughbook (CF-31), spend my days floating in my pool writing code. A similar QoL as before lockdown. Not everyone’s lockdown experience was the same. Lockdown QoL was a mix of privilege and pre-lockdown decisions. Lots of folks couldn’t afford better conditions. Lots of folks optimized for living life outside their home.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    A floating desk? Sounds cool of course, but doesn’t the movement distract?
    - r3trohack3r 5y ago
      You’d think! But I adjusted surprisingly quick. I’m not sure there is a “trick” to it as much as the brain just adapts and you forget you’re looking at a moving screen.
  - colmvp 5y ago
    Personally I don't find wide sq. footage to be super necessary. My unit is less than a third of your space, and even then on a day-to-day basis I really only use half of that (home office, living room, kitchen). I grew up in a giant house and spent most of my time in my bedroom / living room. I will admit it helps to have a nice view and peace and quiet.
    - 5y ago
zachrose 5y ago
Unbelievable. It’s only five in the morning and I’m right where I work. And while the other poor sods struggle in on the tube, I’m going to get some milk out of a cow! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE
tims33 5y ago
I'm not sure of the point of this comparison. My grandparents had a dairy farm that they lived on their entire lives. It is a 6-7 day/week job and the days are long. If you want to take a day off you have to pay someone to come do the work. It also has nothing to do with WFH. My grandpa might start the day in the barn, drive a tractor to a field a few miles away to cut hay for a few hours, come back for lunch, fix a fence, feed some calves, run the silo, then milk the cows for a second time. It's not like he was ever sitting on his ass staring at a screen. There is a hard fulfillment that comes with that life. And it's definitely not WFH.
deleted 5y ago
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duxup 5y ago
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 business and farming is a pretty tough one at that ...
- retzkek 5y ago
  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.
  - duxup 5y ago
    "Commercial" farming is no assurance of stability either.
    - retzkek 5y ago
      I was actually leaning the other way: probably easier to scratch out a subsistence living than to try to make a consistent profit.
      - duxup 5y ago
        Oh I get it now, yeah that might true. That's a really interesting question. Lotta factors there.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Commercial farming is also "subsistence" if you don't have enough savings. If your crop is inedible you still have to buy food from somewhere with something ..
- pjc50 5y ago
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
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.
- misterS 5y ago
  > and are financially secure. 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.
- BrS96bVxXBLzf5B 5y ago
  > at your own pace If anybody working for themselves would disagree with this thought, farmers are high on the list.
- retzkek 5y ago
  > I can see how it can be a lot less stressful if you're your own boss and are financially secure. 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
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  > working for someone else, with their deadlines The problem is that you cannot discuss deadlines with chickens either: they have to be fed on time, or else.
  - 5y ago
spelunker 5y ago
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 striving for. Also, try gardening, it's fun to grow your own produce.
- NationalPark 5y ago
  There's no mention of all the government assistance in terms of loans, infrastructure, subsidies, welfare programs for employee healthcare and retirement, etc. Maybe if other industries had as many entitlements they would make fodder for disillusioned urban bloggers as well.
  - whall6 5y ago
    Also no mention that rural suicide rates are higher than urban
  - maweki 5y ago
    "Entitlements" is a strange word for this. The fact is, that farming dairy, cattle, and produce pays so little through the primary market that those people would starve if not for government subsidies. The people who literally prevent every other person on the continent from starving. Farming is hard and pays little.
    - kvgr 5y ago
      Well if the subsidies stopped and some farmers quit, then the producers would have to pay more. And farmers would return. I don’t get this constant subsidies to farmers everywhere. We take your taxes and shove it to farmers so you can have cheap corn and get fat. Maybe if some products werent so heavily subsidiest farmers would other, better food.
      - 5y ago
mustafa_pasi 5y ago
The statement is not true in general. The typical layout of a European village is having the houses close to the centre and the arable land surrounding the village. You wouldn't have your arable land directly outside of your porch (you wouldn't even have a porch). And that was probably the setup centuries ago when feudalism was still practiced. Through inheritance, the last pre-industrial farmers were tending to parcels of land all over the place, although probably still within a reasonable commute of their village. But definitely not "working from home".
- wott 5y ago
  > The typical layout of a European village There is no such thing. It presents huge variations between countries and between regions. If I take a few examples simply from France: 1. North-East would be as you say, a concentrated village, very few isolated small farms but a few isolated powerful farms with walled buildings. 2. South-West would be the exact opposite, almost no village, almost only isolated single-family farms. 3. But in the Pyrenees (part of South-West), you have a more complex setup: almost no isolated farm, villages exists but are small, but by way of compensation many hamlets of 10 to 50 houses. 4. and a few other models depending on regions. I grew up in (2): in my municipality of 180-200 inhabitants, there was only like 10 houses in the village (including the school and the presbytery). In the neighbouring municipality of 150 inhabitants, the "village" was a church, the presbytery and 1 house. A few municipalities here and there had a real burg, but then they were... burgs: market towns with shops and stuff, farming was not the main activity of most inhabitants. In that configuration, people absolutely worked from home and immediately around the home. They would only leave their farm to go the market in a burg once a week or once a month to sell their extra, and buy a few things. And to go to the village church once a week too. In configuration (3), that's pretty much the same. You don't have all your fields immediately around, but the kernel of inhabitants is small enough that everyone has got a little something immediately there, used as garden and/or for poultry and stuff, and then the fields/meadows are spread around still on a walking distance. Then there would be a lot to say on where the cattle is kept and how the houses are built accordingly. There are a lot of variations there. Even just between 2 French mountains or inside the same mountain. In the Alps, you would have 1 (or 2) huge buildings; in the Pyrenees, you have several small buildings. In the Pyrenees, the animals were kept more separated from the humans than in the Alps (where in some places they slept together in winter times to benefit of the warmth). In the Alps, the hay was brought back and kept in a single place; in the Pyrenees, the hay is kept in a number of small barns spread around in each pasture (a factor in the spreading & separation of animals). The organisation can be different if you go 20 km down the river, or 2 valleys aside. In (2) where I grew up, the stable was not always but often part of the house (below the house), at some of my neighbours and school mates, we were going to "the toilets" in the stable between the cows still in the 80s; there are other places where it used to be more like that (like some of the Alps cases I just talked about), and other places were the animal were in different buildings. Plenty of different models, not just one model per country and definitely not one European model.
VLM 5y ago
Supply and demand. We're not running out of dirt and not running out of water (east of the mississippi) or running out of farm labor. So if your farmer neighbor works 7x10 and you work 6x8 you are going out of business. Side job makes it better for individuals and worse for the community. My great uncle gentleman-farmed 40 or so acres of sweet corn and had a roadside stand on the major road he lived on. But the gas stations he owned paid the real bills. Meanwhile his neighbor corn farmers had to compete (on a small scale) with a guy who doesn't need to make money and thinks restoring tractors is a hobby (so he needs something for the tractors to do after he fixes them up, next thing you know he has 40 acres of corn planted...) Luckily his competitor neighbors had a lot more than 40 acres or he'd have put them out of business. Any low barrier of entry, high supply low demand job is going to be very rough on the employees. Imagine being a supermarket cashier, which is bad enough, but also having to put up money to buy and stock the store before even being allowed to labor there. Meanwhile the guy down the street is doing it as a hobby off second mortgages or other employment to pay the bills. So that's farming. The cost of food is high because of innumerable layers of middlemen, also lots of "value added" processing. Corn runs around 10 cents per liter (weird measurement system but whatever). Corn flakes cost a supermarket consumer a couple bucks per liter. The farmers get pennies on the dollar at most. That's why they're motivated to "do all that work for free" when selling direct to customers in CSAs or farmers markets. It must be heartbreaking to see three corn ears saran-wrapped at a food store for $1.50 and know as a farmer you only got a penny from that to pay all your bills, which probably near approach the penny earned. So selling ears at the "hipster farmers market" is a good deal at a quarter per ear. On the other hand if you "invested" four hours loading the trucks and driving and 8 hours sitting there, its easy to go broke on an amazing profit margin if it rains on the farm market that day so people stay home. Anyway, aside from heartbreaking stories about family farms, we simply have too many farmers, so they're working for miserable pay under miserable conditions, mostly. Biggest scam ever by corporate PR is pushing the loss of the family farm story to keep the WAY too many middlemen story out of the news.
mannykannot 5y ago
Let's not forget the migrant farmworkers.
Blackstone4 5y ago
More like they live at work....
clipradiowallet 5y ago
Farming is hard work. Commercial farmers in my area pull 18+ hour days during harvest time. I don't think articles about farming quite capture just how labor-intensive farming is, how little sleep you get, and the overly hot/wet/dry conditions you have to work through during harvest.
tehjoker 5y ago
A big difference between farming and WFH discourse is that if you own the farm, your labor is all to your benefit and controlled by you (even if circumstances can demand a lot). Office work is dictated by bosses that control you. Your labor and reward are alienated from you. Strict separation is a good idea because that shit is toxic.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  That "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
davidjytang 5y ago
Decades back in my country, majority of farmers didn't own farms. They had to work in someone else's field for pay.
Rochus 5y ago
Farmers never work from home. Has he ever been at a farm? The farmer does not live where the cattle live, and the animal feed is not stored where he lives. Farmers are in the barn or working in the field most of the time. When they are at home, they eat or sleep, or occasionally watch TV, although after an 18-hour day one is usually too tired to do so. And there are even many more farmers who do not have their own land, and often have to travel far to get to the rented farm or field. And there are even more farm workers who travel far and wide by the thousands during the harvest to do their work. Many people have an unrealistic idea of rural life.
op00to 5y ago
Farmers have incredibly high incidence of mental health issues compared to the general population. Farmers are under incredible stress. Farmers are more likely to say life is not worth living than the general population. Maybe they are not a good example. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6926562/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6926562/
xg15 5y ago
I find this a weird take. Farmers were "working from home" long before the concepts of "workplace", "working time" and "spare time" were invented - those are (to my knowledge) products of the industrial revolution and its estranged, highly structured factory work. You might as well ask how the medieval world managed to maintain such a stellar CO2 balance.

113 points by artpi 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
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TaupeRanger 5y ago
A farmer on Hacker News? Please tell me more.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  Well, I start my day by checking crypto prices. I eat my coffee and toast as I unwrap the new shipment of 3090's...
  - hundchenkatze 5y ago
    I think mining crypto currencies makes you a miner, not a farmer.
    - blackbear_ 5y ago
      But they manage a server farm, not a server mine.
- devwastaken 5y ago
  Also come from farmers. Horses. Hay costs are through the roof because drought and heat, vets are expensive, far and few between. Less demand than ever, and everything is expensive. Glad I'm not in it as much anymore. Would like to be out of it entirely but #family and "Local only" software work half the country away don't mix. The others that operate the farm nowadays are absolutely swamped. Not enough money to do it full time so they work other full time jobs.
  - hycaria 5y ago
    Where and what kind of horses ? In europe there's a sport horse shortage I swear. Prices are through the roof !
- flavius29663 5y ago
  They must be. Remember the farmers "hacking" their tractors with Ukrainian firmware, so they can fix their own John Deer machines?
- gifwithaj 5y ago
  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 specific soil and weather conditions. Tractors are largely self-driving along with a host of technology to rival a race car and harvesters give live feedback on the quality and quantity of grain so that farmers can make decisions about what to do with the grain- sell immediately, store, or take to a specialized storage facility to dry. Crops are rotated seasonally to minimize pests and optimize soil quality, sometimes on complex multi-year patterns of cover crops, cash crops, spring harvests, etc. Underground "tiling" is installed to speed the flow of water away from low-lying sections of fields to maintain consistent soil moisture across fields on rolling hills. And the futures, options, insurance and debt financing decisions to maintain stable income in the face of unpredictable weather and commodity prices rivals what any investment banker in Manhattan is doing. And that's just for commodity grain producers, meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables have their own unique uses of cutting edge science and technology. A group of farmers in Iowa sitting at a conference about managing soil nitrogen are likely leveraging far more real science and tech than a group of web developers in the bay discussing the latest updates to React.
  - cardosof 5y ago
    Thank you for this comment. The internet as a whole needs more of this so we all stop thinking tech and innovation mean a smaller gadget, a new frontend or a VR/AR app.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >"are likely leveraging far more real science and tech than a group of web developers in the bay discussing the latest updates to React." +1000. For some of those their sense of entitlement to be an "expert" in unrelated field outstrips the actual capacity.
  - TaupeRanger 5y ago
    Yikes...accusing me of something akin to racism seems harsh. I am a musician myself, and am always curious about what brings people from other disciplines to HN. Apologies if I caused any offense.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  There are many of us. https://mulligan.farm https://mulligan.farm
- giantg2 5y ago
  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%)
- chucksta 5y ago
  What is surprising about that? Farmers were are a driving force for right to repair
  - TaupeRanger 5y ago
    Haven't seen much talk about farming here at all. It was just a curious question.
- pueblito 5y ago
  I’m a farmer in southern Colorado. Currently we grow marijuana and potatoes. I’m on HN because because I’m a long time Linux user (20+ years) and free software advocate and this is where a lot of the old bofhs still lurk
bachmeier 5y ago
I grew up on a farm. I remember having conversations with other farm kids complaining about boredom during certain parts of the year. They had literally nothing to do for a few weeks several times a year. During the winter, which was long in North Dakota, there was basically nothing for a farmer (as opposed to a rancher) to do. They would do things of little value to pass the time, maybe they'd overhaul an engine if it was needed, but for the most part they could have watched TV all day if they wanted - and many of them did that or went to the bar. 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.

defaultname 5y ago

What possible value is there in holding a farmer's lifestyle as a model or contrast for knowledge workers? Are work/life balance concerns not a problem because someone somewhere collects eggs at 5am and vegetables at 8pm? Further, suicides and other mental health issues are endemic among farmers. And I'm pretty sure work-life balance is an endless concern for those so engaged.

randomdata 5y ago
As a farmer and WFH veteran of the software industry for 20 years, I think there are some decent parallels. I’m not sure the article expresses them well.
- enumjorge 5y ago
  As someone who knows nothing about farming, those two seem so different in my mind. I’d love to hear your take on what the similarities are.

nonameiguess 5y ago

> 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 plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them.

screye 5y ago
> 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
- watwut 5y ago
  Where do you have less then 10% of US population being slaves from? I found 18 percent of the total population in 1790, or roughly one in every six people. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-population-us-1790-1880/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-... And based on what I know, it then went up due to cotton boom.
  - screye 5y ago
    You're correct that it seems to have peaked around 18%, but mostly hovered between 10-18%. It sat around 15% during the civil war. Note that these numbers do not include native Americans, who constituted between 1-3 million themselves, since the census didn't count them. Considering them as part of the total should indeed bring the numbers under 10%. Whether that is fair or not is up to the reader :) I still maintain that the majority of the people working on farms were most likely white. This is especially true since many states did not have slaves at all. I will admit that it is likely, that the most gruelling work on the field was given to the slaves.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

I think the problem is, the work (on computers) is never done. It takes months for me to say, "well, I got that wheat harvested" (in computer terms). There's always some more bullshit, so you can't just step away; more is always waiting, and you're always blocking someone somehow. The way we make money digitally does not map to a practical, dynamic life. We need to re-structure what "work" is, what it is we are trying to accomplish, and how.

alistairSH 5y ago
The same if true on a farm. There's always something to do. It appears to me that it's even more true on a farm - the list of things to do is never-ending and many are tightly constrained by season and weather. At least with software dev, we can get up and walk away without a crop rotting or livestock starving or being eaten by wolves. Plow a field. Harvest something. Sheer the lambs. Fix the irrigation. Repair a tractor. Update the books. Apply for government grants. Fix a fence.
lasagnaphil 5y ago
It's not that the work is never done, it's just that most of what we really work on computers is actually made-up bullshit and doesn't really connect to producing actual material things. (You earn money for it though, but money is as immaterial as it gets... and then you get to spend the majority of it on rent, education, healthcare, and various services, which are also all immaterial things.) Actual production seemed to have disappeared in today's neoliberal societies: they're either relegated to the Third World, or automated enough for not that many people to participate in. But the twist is: the nostalgia of productive "down-to-earth" work now becomes a captivating force, but that is exactly what the current system wants to provide you with the fantasy of work.

barrenko 5y ago

Watch Clarkson's Farm and then try again.

alistairSH 5y ago
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 silliness, it was plainly obvious it was a lot of hard work and long hours. All for a few hundred GBP profit at the end of the season. Yes, you read that correctly - the grain (the farm's primary output) only provided a tiny profit for all the work that went into it.
- mschild 5y ago
  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.
  - arethuza 5y ago
    I think the whole point of the show is that Clarkson makes mistakes and then has to be corrected by sensible people who do know what they are doing. Clearly it was planned this way but I thought it worked really well.

kubb 5y ago

You could watch somebody work 16 hours, and totally like the idea, but you yourself of course would be too broken and debilitated by your internet access to do the same. But if you did, you'd be happy, you just know it. A simpler life, fruits of your labor and such.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

And farmers also had pretty crappy lives too. If I gotta be in an office 8 hours a day so I can eat deep fried Chinese food, have a car, and live in a nice apartment, so be it. Better than eating half assed food on a farm on top of meagre wages.

sriram_sun 5y ago

I wonder where farm workers are from? :). My point is that almost all farm workers are at least temporarily displaced from their homes.

Tade0 5y ago

Hailing from Poland (like the author) I see this write-up as a yet another manifestation of the toxic culture of overwork prevalent in this country. I lived like that during the first years of working remotely and it's both inefficient and unhealthy.

corty 5y ago

The entire premise of the article is untrue. Larger farms always had paid or unpaid laborers who where not "the Farmer" but still farmers. With the industrialisation this tendency increased as mom&pop farms got fewer and average farm size increased. In the whole eastern block, private small farms were absent or an exception, the rule was the kolkhoz model, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landwirtschaftliche_Produktionsgenossenschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landwirtschaftliche_Produktion... Farmers were employees with regular work time, fields of employment like operating machinery, milking or tending lifestock. The author ignores all this and draws conclusions from a mostly-wrong stereotype.

supermatt 5y ago

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

r3trohack3r 5y ago
This. As a remote software engineer, I empathize with folks who haven’t optimized for their home to be their day-to-day. I couldn’t imagine spendings lockdown in an SF Apartment. I spent lockdown in a 3k sq. foot home. I have a floating desk and a panasonic toughbook (CF-31), spend my days floating in my pool writing code. A similar QoL as before lockdown. Not everyone’s lockdown experience was the same. Lockdown QoL was a mix of privilege and pre-lockdown decisions. Lots of folks couldn’t afford better conditions. Lots of folks optimized for living life outside their home.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  A floating desk? Sounds cool of course, but doesn’t the movement distract?
  - r3trohack3r 5y ago
    You’d think! But I adjusted surprisingly quick. I’m not sure there is a “trick” to it as much as the brain just adapts and you forget you’re looking at a moving screen.
- colmvp 5y ago
  Personally I don't find wide sq. footage to be super necessary. My unit is less than a third of your space, and even then on a day-to-day basis I really only use half of that (home office, living room, kitchen). I grew up in a giant house and spent most of my time in my bedroom / living room. I will admit it helps to have a nice view and peace and quiet.
  - 5y ago

zachrose 5y ago

Unbelievable. It’s only five in the morning and I’m right where I work. And while the other poor sods struggle in on the tube, I’m going to get some milk out of a cow! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE

tims33 5y ago

I'm not sure of the point of this comparison. My grandparents had a dairy farm that they lived on their entire lives. It is a 6-7 day/week job and the days are long. If you want to take a day off you have to pay someone to come do the work. It also has nothing to do with WFH. My grandpa might start the day in the barn, drive a tractor to a field a few miles away to cut hay for a few hours, come back for lunch, fix a fence, feed some calves, run the silo, then milk the cows for a second time. It's not like he was ever sitting on his ass staring at a screen. There is a hard fulfillment that comes with that life. And it's definitely not WFH.

deleted 5y ago

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duxup 5y ago

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 business and farming is a pretty tough one at that ...

retzkek 5y ago
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.
- duxup 5y ago
  "Commercial" farming is no assurance of stability either.
  - retzkek 5y ago
    I was actually leaning the other way: probably easier to scratch out a subsistence living than to try to make a consistent profit.
    - duxup 5y ago
      Oh I get it now, yeah that might true. That's a really interesting question. Lotta factors there.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Commercial farming is also "subsistence" if you don't have enough savings. If your crop is inedible you still have to buy food from somewhere with something ..
pjc50 5y ago

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

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.

misterS 5y ago
> and are financially secure. 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.
BrS96bVxXBLzf5B 5y ago
> at your own pace If anybody working for themselves would disagree with this thought, farmers are high on the list.
retzkek 5y ago
> I can see how it can be a lot less stressful if you're your own boss and are financially secure. 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
AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
> working for someone else, with their deadlines The problem is that you cannot discuss deadlines with chickens either: they have to be fed on time, or else.
- 5y ago

spelunker 5y ago

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 striving for. Also, try gardening, it's fun to grow your own produce.

NationalPark 5y ago
There's no mention of all the government assistance in terms of loans, infrastructure, subsidies, welfare programs for employee healthcare and retirement, etc. Maybe if other industries had as many entitlements they would make fodder for disillusioned urban bloggers as well.
- whall6 5y ago
  Also no mention that rural suicide rates are higher than urban
- maweki 5y ago
  "Entitlements" is a strange word for this. The fact is, that farming dairy, cattle, and produce pays so little through the primary market that those people would starve if not for government subsidies. The people who literally prevent every other person on the continent from starving. Farming is hard and pays little.
  - kvgr 5y ago
    Well if the subsidies stopped and some farmers quit, then the producers would have to pay more. And farmers would return. I don’t get this constant subsidies to farmers everywhere. We take your taxes and shove it to farmers so you can have cheap corn and get fat. Maybe if some products werent so heavily subsidiest farmers would other, better food.
    - 5y ago

mustafa_pasi 5y ago

The statement is not true in general. The typical layout of a European village is having the houses close to the centre and the arable land surrounding the village. You wouldn't have your arable land directly outside of your porch (you wouldn't even have a porch). And that was probably the setup centuries ago when feudalism was still practiced. Through inheritance, the last pre-industrial farmers were tending to parcels of land all over the place, although probably still within a reasonable commute of their village. But definitely not "working from home".

wott 5y ago
> The typical layout of a European village There is no such thing. It presents huge variations between countries and between regions. If I take a few examples simply from France: 1. North-East would be as you say, a concentrated village, very few isolated small farms but a few isolated powerful farms with walled buildings. 2. South-West would be the exact opposite, almost no village, almost only isolated single-family farms. 3. But in the Pyrenees (part of South-West), you have a more complex setup: almost no isolated farm, villages exists but are small, but by way of compensation many hamlets of 10 to 50 houses. 4. and a few other models depending on regions. I grew up in (2): in my municipality of 180-200 inhabitants, there was only like 10 houses in the village (including the school and the presbytery). In the neighbouring municipality of 150 inhabitants, the "village" was a church, the presbytery and 1 house. A few municipalities here and there had a real burg, but then they were... burgs: market towns with shops and stuff, farming was not the main activity of most inhabitants. In that configuration, people absolutely worked from home and immediately around the home. They would only leave their farm to go the market in a burg once a week or once a month to sell their extra, and buy a few things. And to go to the village church once a week too. In configuration (3), that's pretty much the same. You don't have all your fields immediately around, but the kernel of inhabitants is small enough that everyone has got a little something immediately there, used as garden and/or for poultry and stuff, and then the fields/meadows are spread around still on a walking distance. Then there would be a lot to say on where the cattle is kept and how the houses are built accordingly. There are a lot of variations there. Even just between 2 French mountains or inside the same mountain. In the Alps, you would have 1 (or 2) huge buildings; in the Pyrenees, you have several small buildings. In the Pyrenees, the animals were kept more separated from the humans than in the Alps (where in some places they slept together in winter times to benefit of the warmth). In the Alps, the hay was brought back and kept in a single place; in the Pyrenees, the hay is kept in a number of small barns spread around in each pasture (a factor in the spreading & separation of animals). The organisation can be different if you go 20 km down the river, or 2 valleys aside. In (2) where I grew up, the stable was not always but often part of the house (below the house), at some of my neighbours and school mates, we were going to "the toilets" in the stable between the cows still in the 80s; there are other places where it used to be more like that (like some of the Alps cases I just talked about), and other places were the animal were in different buildings. Plenty of different models, not just one model per country and definitely not one European model.

VLM 5y ago

Supply and demand. We're not running out of dirt and not running out of water (east of the mississippi) or running out of farm labor. So if your farmer neighbor works 7x10 and you work 6x8 you are going out of business. Side job makes it better for individuals and worse for the community. My great uncle gentleman-farmed 40 or so acres of sweet corn and had a roadside stand on the major road he lived on. But the gas stations he owned paid the real bills. Meanwhile his neighbor corn farmers had to compete (on a small scale) with a guy who doesn't need to make money and thinks restoring tractors is a hobby (so he needs something for the tractors to do after he fixes them up, next thing you know he has 40 acres of corn planted...) Luckily his competitor neighbors had a lot more than 40 acres or he'd have put them out of business. Any low barrier of entry, high supply low demand job is going to be very rough on the employees. Imagine being a supermarket cashier, which is bad enough, but also having to put up money to buy and stock the store before even being allowed to labor there. Meanwhile the guy down the street is doing it as a hobby off second mortgages or other employment to pay the bills. So that's farming. The cost of food is high because of innumerable layers of middlemen, also lots of "value added" processing. Corn runs around 10 cents per liter (weird measurement system but whatever). Corn flakes cost a supermarket consumer a couple bucks per liter. The farmers get pennies on the dollar at most. That's why they're motivated to "do all that work for free" when selling direct to customers in CSAs or farmers markets. It must be heartbreaking to see three corn ears saran-wrapped at a food store for $1.50 and know as a farmer you only got a penny from that to pay all your bills, which probably near approach the penny earned. So selling ears at the "hipster farmers market" is a good deal at a quarter per ear. On the other hand if you "invested" four hours loading the trucks and driving and 8 hours sitting there, its easy to go broke on an amazing profit margin if it rains on the farm market that day so people stay home. Anyway, aside from heartbreaking stories about family farms, we simply have too many farmers, so they're working for miserable pay under miserable conditions, mostly. Biggest scam ever by corporate PR is pushing the loss of the family farm story to keep the WAY too many middlemen story out of the news.

mannykannot 5y ago

Let's not forget the migrant farmworkers.

Blackstone4 5y ago

More like they live at work....

clipradiowallet 5y ago

Farming is hard work. Commercial farmers in my area pull 18+ hour days during harvest time. I don't think articles about farming quite capture just how labor-intensive farming is, how little sleep you get, and the overly hot/wet/dry conditions you have to work through during harvest.

tehjoker 5y ago

A big difference between farming and WFH discourse is that if you own the farm, your labor is all to your benefit and controlled by you (even if circumstances can demand a lot). Office work is dictated by bosses that control you. Your labor and reward are alienated from you. Strict separation is a good idea because that shit is toxic.

dredmorbius 5y ago
That "if" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

davidjytang 5y ago

Decades back in my country, majority of farmers didn't own farms. They had to work in someone else's field for pay.

Rochus 5y ago

Farmers never work from home. Has he ever been at a farm? The farmer does not live where the cattle live, and the animal feed is not stored where he lives. Farmers are in the barn or working in the field most of the time. When they are at home, they eat or sleep, or occasionally watch TV, although after an 18-hour day one is usually too tired to do so. And there are even many more farmers who do not have their own land, and often have to travel far to get to the rented farm or field. And there are even more farm workers who travel far and wide by the thousands during the harvest to do their work. Many people have an unrealistic idea of rural life.

op00to 5y ago

Farmers have incredibly high incidence of mental health issues compared to the general population. Farmers are under incredible stress. Farmers are more likely to say life is not worth living than the general population. Maybe they are not a good example. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6926562/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6926562/

xg15 5y ago

I find this a weird take. Farmers were "working from home" long before the concepts of "workplace", "working time" and "spare time" were invented - those are (to my knowledge) products of the industrial revolution and its estranged, highly structured factory work. You might as well ask how the medieval world managed to maintain such a stellar CO2 balance.