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There's a lot to do on a farm, yet no farmer is expected to be working a full 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, at moderate intensity. No farmer has to do somethi
by sph 2mo ago
There's a lot to do on a farm, yet no farmer is expected to be working a full 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, at moderate intensity. No farmer has to do something within the next hour or their boss shouts at them. No farmer has to feel bad, or need to catch up, if they have to take a day off unless it's planting season. No farmer has any qualm about ending a day early because they've done all they planned to do. No farmer obsesses with stimulant medication or correct dosage of modafinil to get through their daily work.
And there's a huge difference between a subsistence farmer, which most of humanity has been for most of history, and intensive farming, which admittedly benefits from machines, but it's anyway a much more regimented industrial operation.
- egocodedinsol 2mo agoHired hands, serfs, migrant workers had all of that and more for most of human history.
- Schiendelman 2mo agoI recently read that serfs weren't expected to work more than a few hours a day until industrial automation really took hold. I wish I had the link, but it made sense - and then labor laws were a reaction to those expectations, not solving a long running problem.
- wbadart 2mo agoMy favorite recent read on the topic was from Brett Devereaux: https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iva-subsistence-and-a-little-more/ https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an... TL;DR: whether farming takes all your waking hours depends on the size of your lands and household
- fwipsy 2mo agoI thought of the same series, but that's not the tl;dr I would have chosen at all. I would have gone to part 4e where I found this quote near the end: > We should also note that these women work an enormous amount. We estimated, you will recall, working hours for our male peasants on the order of 2,500 to 3,500 working hours per year, massively more than modern full-time employment (40 hours per week is ~2000, typically around 1,750 hours after sick time, vacation, holidays and such). By contrast our peasant women are working in this model 3,760 hours per year, significantly more than their fathers, husbands and brothers and wildly more than modern workers. It's nice to think that our ancestors didn't have to work as hard, because it justifies our own desire for more leisure time. IMO that desire is justified anyways; but premodern subsistence farming/any sort of self-supported lifestyle is incredibly labor-intensive compared to modern agriculture, regardless of whether you're a serf or a freeholder.
- cyanregiment 2mo agoI mean, they would cut your balls off (castration) just to qualify you for unpaid labor in the old world. > modafinil Militaries once issued coca, while opium was sold at markets as recently as the 1930s (over-the-counter). Across the board it seems like things were rougher and cruder “back then” whenever ever back then was. They had more freedom in other ways.
- cwmoore 2mo agoThere are a few million people in jail and supervision in the USA, offloading the crudity and performing the work of incentivizing conformity, at slave wages as we speak.
- cyanregiment 2mo agoWhat was imprisonment like in 1920? 1320? What year were the Mayans rolling heads down staircases? I’ll take now
- folkrav 2mo ago“Things can’t be bad now cause they were bad before”
- cyanregiment 2mo ago"Things can't be good now cause they were good before"
- cwmoore 2mo ago
- grigri907 2mo agoI don't know shit about farming but I still don't think there is a single true statement in what you've said. Why would a farmer not be expected to work a 40 hour week? What farmer doesn't have targets, goals, deadlines, constraints, expectations? You think agricultural workers don't depend on, use, and abuse drugs?! This reads like, "My job is very complicated, yours is very simple."