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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Animals need taking care of every day year-round. There's very few homesteaders who don't have at least some egg-laying chickens. I have a feeling you're thinking more about industrial-scale monoculture farmers, but that's not what the linked article is talking about.

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Chickens are pretty easy though. You can pay some neighborhood teenagers to take care of the flock while you’re in Aruba.

We had about 20 chickens and this is exactly what we did. Not sure why you got downvoted.

Talking about farmscale agriculture, it's hundreds of chickens at least. If it's pastured, they likely need to be moved quite often.

Chickens are likely easiest, but on a scale to produce a living for a family, I don't think any type of farming or ranching is low effort or easy to step away from.

I bet most people don't know chickens need light to lay eggs, their egg laying will slow down as the days grow shorter. Plus they will kill each other if even the slightest bit of blood appears. And the smell oh the smell!

This problems improve if given enough space and aren't crowded

We have hundreds of chickens most years now, and yea the neighbours can take care of them for a week or two. The biggest thing that keeps us from traveling in the summer is our "garden".

When I was a child we had some chickens. The most difficult part was keeping them safe outside dogs, cats kill them for fun. Foxes and other wild animals tend to really like them for lunch.

We learned the hard way that pigs also like to kill chickens for fun. Although it's possible this behavior was unique to our pig.

> I have a feeling you're thinking more about industrial-scale monoculture farmers

That seems to be what the article is about. The first case study is a vegetable farm, without any hint that they produce anything else. They are also industrial-scale, else they would be considered gardeners, not farmers.

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