7 ms·

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 fr

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.
    - maweki 5y ago
      Remember that these agricultural feedback cycles are not instant and demand for food is only flexible to a point (if people starving is not a viable option). Removing production capabilities quickly, even with price increases, does not make for fewer mouths to feed.
      - kvgr 5y ago
        You can do it gradually. Just look at Netherlands and New Zealand
    - jeromegv 5y ago
      There's a strategic advantage for a country to grow your own produce. You drop all subsidies, it's likely that you can't compete with country XYZ and now suddenly one of the most important thing for your citizen has to be imported instead of being produced locally. This has lots of side effects and of course you are more at the mercy of international supply chain problems (COVID!) which cause shortage, high cost, etc. Running out of food is a really bad situation to be in. This isn't as easy as "supply and demand" to fix the market as other industries. I'm more familiar with Philippines, but they turn out to have a very poor local farming industry. You go to the grocery store, majority is imported from abroad. We are talking of a country with 110M population. Makes food expensive, and lots of people are not exactly rich over there (on top of the issue of having country side people not having jobs)
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - imtringued 5y ago
      You can't eat bank notes. Money can be stored, most foods spoil very quickly. This asymmetry results in inflation once your farms are gone. Just look at Zimbabwe. So the obvious strategy is to support your farmers, help them get through the bad years and make sure there is always some slack. If you cut subsidies then the free market will trim agriculture for efficiency, meaning producing exactly enough food and not a single grain of wheat more. Any supply shocks will cause famine because there are no farmers overproducing beyond the need of what the market is willing to pay.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    "Entitlement" is a term of art [1] that means that the farmers are legally entitled to those benefits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement
    - obeid 5y ago
      Doesn't mean it was not a bad choice of a word to represent the concept. Politicians who create and use these terms are doing it with intent, if it was up to them, they would indeed starve the farmers, you, me and everyone we know.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - Mchl 5y ago
        Or maybe the word was subverted after it was chosen to represent this concept? Not saying it was the case (I don't know) just mentioning the possibility.
- ericmay 5y ago
  Yea you mean subsidies like 401ks, office building tax subsidies, welfare and food stamps for baristas and janitors instead of living wages, subway systems, and people getting stimulus checks to work from home? Or do you just mean the subsidies for a group you happen to want to make a snide remark about? C'mon. You think Wal-Mart and Starbucks aren't being subsidized by welfare programs so they can keep wages low?
  - deleted 5y ago
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- rabuse 5y ago
  May be an unpopular opinion, but I'm all for my taxes helping us not starve to death.
snarf21 5y ago
The only people who think farming sounds great are people who have never farmed. Having all your income depend on the weather or random government policies/tariffs is heart breaking. You need tremendous scale to weather the storm. Go watch "Clarkson's Farm" to get a glimpse of the realities. (Remember that he is extremely rich and doesn't even care if the farm loses money.) The only good thing about farming is that you only have to work half days, just pick any 12 hours you like!! (Source: both of my families have historically farmed.) I think there is old line about how to become rich racing cars. First, you start out extremely rich. Then, you start a race team. The same is true with farming. Unless you start out rich or inherited the farm for free, it is going to be a slog.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  I'm no farmer, but you can see the extremely expensive and sophisticated farming machines pretty much every time you drive past a rural area. Giant watering machines, extremely weird "collector" thingies, and a whole slew of farmers complaining to John Deere about "right to repair". Modern Farming is about having huge infrastructure so that very few people can create lots and lots of food. Between the fertilizer, the bountiful land, the water, the sophisticated machines, etc. etc. Also, I had a few teachers who went to the local agriculture university and talked to me about soil types and soil tests. Farmers have to be extremely up-to-date on chemistry, botany and even general biology: you survey your fields by taking chemical tests to determine the nutrients in the soil. You keep careful eyes on your crops at each stage of development: ensuring that they're progressing as expected. Finally, you also need to be on the lookout for insects and/or animals, who can destroy your crops. But not just insects and animals... but also fungus, bacteria, and viruses. (Plants get sick too, just like humans). If a plant-virus starts to spread in your farm, you could lose the entire crop. You're pretty much the "Crop Doctor", and need to be able to tell the different kinds of diseases that can come up (is it a fungus? Should you spray fungicides all over your plants? Should you spray insecticides? Should you burn your crops to prevent the spread?) And despite the miracles of modern nitrogen-based farming... micronutrients in the soil still matter. So you still got that whole crop-rotation thing if you want your soil to rejuvenate between crops. ---------- Soil alone is already a major issue. If you've got too much clay in your soil, you need to find sand and/or compost and mix it into your land. Or you know... sell your land and find better soil. /not actually a Farmer, but had the pleasure of talking to some...
manachar 5y ago
Depends on the farm and how much hustle the farmer is forced to have to try to make a profit on a commodity profit. Most modern farms have an insane work load to desperately try to pay the bills making a product that may be worth less on the commodity market than it cost you to grow. The older style family farm was usually only super busy for relatively brief periods of time (harvest, calving season, etc). There was always work to be done, but you fit the work in to the rhythm of the day and had the family to help. Oh, you had to get up and milk the cows, collect the eggs, etc, but your total acreage and consumer base was usually small enough that daily work was kept in a manageable balance. Additionally, I think you're missing the point of the article, which is clearly stated as instead of trying to balance two different lives we need to make our lives whole again and allow what we do for income to be as satisfyingly part of our lives as any other aspects. This point is... well bluntly a double edged sword. Like farmers it meant you might have to attend to something in the middle of the night. Or the crunch season has hit so you put off watching the telly or playing a game. But it also means you're close to your family and house and can spend time with them, often even while working. The article is questioning the relatively new division between our working lives and our personal lives and advocates demolishing that boundary for a more holistic experience. I'm not 100% sold on this, especially for workers who are not owners of their labor (i.e. employees rather than founders-partners). These people will make family of their coworkers only to be laid off at the first economic down turn, or skip out on looking for new employment to better capitalize on their skills because they have built a life at Acme.
galangalalgol 5y ago
farming is super time consuming. The first farmers probably reminisced about hunter gatherers and how they only spent a fraction of their time working. Which was true, but unless they were in a great location starvation was always decent chance too.
artpi 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! (Author here) Fair criticism! We own the house for 30 years and I grew up with this farmer. He is trying to get out of farming, and for good reason. It's just damn hard! But it has it's perks. Mainly not debating yet another JavaScript framework.
- spelunker 5y ago
  Appreciate the context. I like your concept, but I think the analogy with farming is a bit off. In any case, you're maintaining a blog and I'm just typing comments in hackernews, so keep doing what you're doing.
agumonkey 5y ago
I really wonder what causes the long hours ? market dynamics running prices to the ground until the guys cant squeeze any more minute from a day ? or just too much tradition in organization forcing them to spend more time than necessary in the fields ?
- spelunker 5y ago
  I think it's the former. I have relatives who farm, and for farming to be profitable requires a _lot_ of product to sell. I also have non-blood relatives trying to start a small farm in rural Pennsylvania. They tried growing and selling oat last year. Apparently it wasn't worth the effort unless they were going to grow and sell it at at huge quantities. Farming isn't necessarily traditions-based. My established farming relatives have incredible $100k+ combines that can practically harvest on their own via GPS with little supervision required. They just need to grow a lot to be profitable (which scaling helps with of course).
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    how is the middle man situation in Northern America ? in France, some kinds of products are made unbearably hard to produce because they'll negotiate you to death (biggest milk corp. lactalis for instance) while they make good premiums on cheese / yogurts etc Maybe with a different distribution structure producers can get a bit more profits and people nicer / fresher products ?
    - spelunker 5y ago
      That's a good question and I don't have a good answer for you. I know some of my relatives produce and sell beet sugar through a cooperative, but I also know that they will sell other crops to large distributors like you mention, or even sometimes directly to grocery stores. I try to buy the coop sugar when I can.
Causality1 5y ago
It's just the "noble savage" fetish for the 21st century. How did they all survive without mental breakdowns and Harvard Business Review articles praising strict Work-Life Balance? They didn't. They beat the shit out of their wives and children. They got pulled out of school to help their parents work the farm. They didn't get to have a comfortable retirement. They spent the last decades of their life in chronic pain. There is no way in hell this dude has ever had a real conversation with an old person who grew up farming.
tdeck 5y ago
Here's a lighthearted sketch on the topic: https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE
tailspin2019 5y ago
> This whole article reads like someone out of touch. I didn’t read it that way at all. > Farming is a hell of a lot of work Hence I guess, the mention of early starts and 16 hour days. > Maybe they find it rewarding, but I don't think it's an ideal everyone should be striving for. Maybe they do find it rewarding. I think the point in the article was not to downplay how much work farming involves, or to say they have it easy, or even to suggest that people should be farmers… The point I took from the article is how integrated/intertwined the farmer’s work is with the rest of their day, as opposed to say rigid 9-5 office hours. The lines are more blurry for them. They (generally) live and work in the same place. It’s definitely not like “working from home” in the sense that we normally think of, but there are some interesting parallels and challenges around trying to keep life in balance (if that’s even thing anyway). It’s a useful and very different perspective from which to look at the concept of “work” and how it integrates into our lives.
l30n4da5 5y ago
In a similar vein, ranching falls prey to some of the same misconceptions. source: grew up on a ranch. nearly every day involved working when I wasn't at school.

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.
  - maweki 5y ago
    Remember that these agricultural feedback cycles are not instant and demand for food is only flexible to a point (if people starving is not a viable option). Removing production capabilities quickly, even with price increases, does not make for fewer mouths to feed.
    - kvgr 5y ago
      You can do it gradually. Just look at Netherlands and New Zealand
  - jeromegv 5y ago
    There's a strategic advantage for a country to grow your own produce. You drop all subsidies, it's likely that you can't compete with country XYZ and now suddenly one of the most important thing for your citizen has to be imported instead of being produced locally. This has lots of side effects and of course you are more at the mercy of international supply chain problems (COVID!) which cause shortage, high cost, etc. Running out of food is a really bad situation to be in. This isn't as easy as "supply and demand" to fix the market as other industries. I'm more familiar with Philippines, but they turn out to have a very poor local farming industry. You go to the grocery store, majority is imported from abroad. We are talking of a country with 110M population. Makes food expensive, and lots of people are not exactly rich over there (on top of the issue of having country side people not having jobs)
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - imtringued 5y ago
    You can't eat bank notes. Money can be stored, most foods spoil very quickly. This asymmetry results in inflation once your farms are gone. Just look at Zimbabwe. So the obvious strategy is to support your farmers, help them get through the bad years and make sure there is always some slack. If you cut subsidies then the free market will trim agriculture for efficiency, meaning producing exactly enough food and not a single grain of wheat more. Any supply shocks will cause famine because there are no farmers overproducing beyond the need of what the market is willing to pay.
- akiselev 5y ago
  "Entitlement" is a term of art [1] that means that the farmers are legally entitled to those benefits. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entitlement
  - obeid 5y ago
    Doesn't mean it was not a bad choice of a word to represent the concept. Politicians who create and use these terms are doing it with intent, if it was up to them, they would indeed starve the farmers, you, me and everyone we know.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Mchl 5y ago
      Or maybe the word was subverted after it was chosen to represent this concept? Not saying it was the case (I don't know) just mentioning the possibility.
ericmay 5y ago
Yea you mean subsidies like 401ks, office building tax subsidies, welfare and food stamps for baristas and janitors instead of living wages, subway systems, and people getting stimulus checks to work from home? Or do you just mean the subsidies for a group you happen to want to make a snide remark about? C'mon. You think Wal-Mart and Starbucks aren't being subsidized by welfare programs so they can keep wages low?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rabuse 5y ago
May be an unpopular opinion, but I'm all for my taxes helping us not starve to death.

snarf21 5y ago

The only people who think farming sounds great are people who have never farmed. Having all your income depend on the weather or random government policies/tariffs is heart breaking. You need tremendous scale to weather the storm. Go watch "Clarkson's Farm" to get a glimpse of the realities. (Remember that he is extremely rich and doesn't even care if the farm loses money.) The only good thing about farming is that you only have to work half days, just pick any 12 hours you like!! (Source: both of my families have historically farmed.) I think there is old line about how to become rich racing cars. First, you start out extremely rich. Then, you start a race team. The same is true with farming. Unless you start out rich or inherited the farm for free, it is going to be a slog.

dragontamer 5y ago
I'm no farmer, but you can see the extremely expensive and sophisticated farming machines pretty much every time you drive past a rural area. Giant watering machines, extremely weird "collector" thingies, and a whole slew of farmers complaining to John Deere about "right to repair". Modern Farming is about having huge infrastructure so that very few people can create lots and lots of food. Between the fertilizer, the bountiful land, the water, the sophisticated machines, etc. etc. Also, I had a few teachers who went to the local agriculture university and talked to me about soil types and soil tests. Farmers have to be extremely up-to-date on chemistry, botany and even general biology: you survey your fields by taking chemical tests to determine the nutrients in the soil. You keep careful eyes on your crops at each stage of development: ensuring that they're progressing as expected. Finally, you also need to be on the lookout for insects and/or animals, who can destroy your crops. But not just insects and animals... but also fungus, bacteria, and viruses. (Plants get sick too, just like humans). If a plant-virus starts to spread in your farm, you could lose the entire crop. You're pretty much the "Crop Doctor", and need to be able to tell the different kinds of diseases that can come up (is it a fungus? Should you spray fungicides all over your plants? Should you spray insecticides? Should you burn your crops to prevent the spread?) And despite the miracles of modern nitrogen-based farming... micronutrients in the soil still matter. So you still got that whole crop-rotation thing if you want your soil to rejuvenate between crops. ---------- Soil alone is already a major issue. If you've got too much clay in your soil, you need to find sand and/or compost and mix it into your land. Or you know... sell your land and find better soil. /not actually a Farmer, but had the pleasure of talking to some...

manachar 5y ago

Depends on the farm and how much hustle the farmer is forced to have to try to make a profit on a commodity profit. Most modern farms have an insane work load to desperately try to pay the bills making a product that may be worth less on the commodity market than it cost you to grow. The older style family farm was usually only super busy for relatively brief periods of time (harvest, calving season, etc). There was always work to be done, but you fit the work in to the rhythm of the day and had the family to help. Oh, you had to get up and milk the cows, collect the eggs, etc, but your total acreage and consumer base was usually small enough that daily work was kept in a manageable balance. Additionally, I think you're missing the point of the article, which is clearly stated as instead of trying to balance two different lives we need to make our lives whole again and allow what we do for income to be as satisfyingly part of our lives as any other aspects. This point is... well bluntly a double edged sword. Like farmers it meant you might have to attend to something in the middle of the night. Or the crunch season has hit so you put off watching the telly or playing a game. But it also means you're close to your family and house and can spend time with them, often even while working. The article is questioning the relatively new division between our working lives and our personal lives and advocates demolishing that boundary for a more holistic experience. I'm not 100% sold on this, especially for workers who are not owners of their labor (i.e. employees rather than founders-partners). These people will make family of their coworkers only to be laid off at the first economic down turn, or skip out on looking for new employment to better capitalize on their skills because they have built a life at Acme.

galangalalgol 5y ago

farming is super time consuming. The first farmers probably reminisced about hunter gatherers and how they only spent a fraction of their time working. Which was true, but unless they were in a great location starvation was always decent chance too.

artpi 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! (Author here) Fair criticism! We own the house for 30 years and I grew up with this farmer. He is trying to get out of farming, and for good reason. It's just damn hard! But it has it's perks. Mainly not debating yet another JavaScript framework.

spelunker 5y ago
Appreciate the context. I like your concept, but I think the analogy with farming is a bit off. In any case, you're maintaining a blog and I'm just typing comments in hackernews, so keep doing what you're doing.

agumonkey 5y ago

I really wonder what causes the long hours ? market dynamics running prices to the ground until the guys cant squeeze any more minute from a day ? or just too much tradition in organization forcing them to spend more time than necessary in the fields ?

spelunker 5y ago
I think it's the former. I have relatives who farm, and for farming to be profitable requires a _lot_ of product to sell. I also have non-blood relatives trying to start a small farm in rural Pennsylvania. They tried growing and selling oat last year. Apparently it wasn't worth the effort unless they were going to grow and sell it at at huge quantities. Farming isn't necessarily traditions-based. My established farming relatives have incredible $100k+ combines that can practically harvest on their own via GPS with little supervision required. They just need to grow a lot to be profitable (which scaling helps with of course).
- agumonkey 5y ago
  how is the middle man situation in Northern America ? in France, some kinds of products are made unbearably hard to produce because they'll negotiate you to death (biggest milk corp. lactalis for instance) while they make good premiums on cheese / yogurts etc Maybe with a different distribution structure producers can get a bit more profits and people nicer / fresher products ?
  - spelunker 5y ago
    That's a good question and I don't have a good answer for you. I know some of my relatives produce and sell beet sugar through a cooperative, but I also know that they will sell other crops to large distributors like you mention, or even sometimes directly to grocery stores. I try to buy the coop sugar when I can.

Causality1 5y ago

It's just the "noble savage" fetish for the 21st century. How did they all survive without mental breakdowns and Harvard Business Review articles praising strict Work-Life Balance? They didn't. They beat the shit out of their wives and children. They got pulled out of school to help their parents work the farm. They didn't get to have a comfortable retirement. They spent the last decades of their life in chronic pain. There is no way in hell this dude has ever had a real conversation with an old person who grew up farming.

tdeck 5y ago

Here's a lighthearted sketch on the topic: https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE

tailspin2019 5y ago

> This whole article reads like someone out of touch. I didn’t read it that way at all. > Farming is a hell of a lot of work Hence I guess, the mention of early starts and 16 hour days. > Maybe they find it rewarding, but I don't think it's an ideal everyone should be striving for. Maybe they do find it rewarding. I think the point in the article was not to downplay how much work farming involves, or to say they have it easy, or even to suggest that people should be farmers… The point I took from the article is how integrated/intertwined the farmer’s work is with the rest of their day, as opposed to say rigid 9-5 office hours. The lines are more blurry for them. They (generally) live and work in the same place. It’s definitely not like “working from home” in the sense that we normally think of, but there are some interesting parallels and challenges around trying to keep life in balance (if that’s even thing anyway). It’s a useful and very different perspective from which to look at the concept of “work” and how it integrates into our lives.

l30n4da5 5y ago

In a similar vein, ranching falls prey to some of the same misconceptions. source: grew up on a ranch. nearly every day involved working when I wasn't at school.