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Comment by DamnYuppie | Hacker News Reader

Can you please provide more context from the "brutal and dangerous rural farm jobs"? I am aware agriculture production in China is very different then here but even at its most labor intensive times it is not something that I would have considered to be "dangerous".

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Farming in general is a dangerous occupation, even in the USA where machinery tends to be reasonably modern and well guarded:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf

I wasn't able to find a source but my understanding is that being a farmer is many times more dangerous on a percentage basis than being a police officer, and that's only counting fatal accidents. I would bet good money that the rate of disfiguring/crippling injury is way higher.

The farming industry is a bit dangerous but that includes things not on the farm. Grain Elevators can kill you pretty quick. There are reasons some big ag companies take safety so seriously that standing on an office chair is a fireable offense.

Also, being a police officer, overall, isn’t as deadly as people think. Specific areas are though.

I seem to recall reading that farming is comparable statistically to mining, or even more dangerous. It's pretty much among the top most dangerous occupations, at any rate. Which is consistent with how historically people have given up farming to work in the seemingly brutal sweatshops in cities, whether in the US and Europe, or in the Third World.

Anecdotally, my grandfather died some time after being burned in a conflagration related to cleaning something with gasoline, and none of his children became farmers. One daughter went to college and became a computer programmer, another started a delivery business, his son went to work for a VA hospital, and his wife sold the farm and became a nurse after her husband died.

It's hard to imagine conditions that predate your parents' time, and most people at this point are probably more than one generation away from their farming ancestors.

Everything is relative but it’s much more dangerous than assembling iPhones. And it is one of the reasons why whenever Foxcon is hiring the applicant lines are so long.

Can we get a citation for these claims? Otherwise it feels a lot like something one says while rocking themselves to sleep at night. The whole thesis of "Sapiens" is exactly the opposite of this, that "progress" has been mainly a way of making life harder. The idea rural farming is somehow more dangerous than moving to a city and working long hours in a factory seems worthy of some numbers. If you basically learn, "Don't stick your face in the thresher" I feel like farming would be fairly low danger.

https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/04/the-most-dange...

This cites some numbers from the CDC, looks like in America farms are dangerous, can’t imagine what it’s like in China. It says farmers are 2x as likely as police and 5x as likely as firefighters to die on the job. My intuition is formed from knowing that logging is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, I kind of assumed farming wasn’t so far off.

I’d suggest that you perform even the most cursory level of research via Google.

In the United States, agriculture is one of the most dangerous occupational categories. Fatality rate is 7x higher than all workers in private industry, and injury rate is 40% higher than all workers. Additionally, exposure to farm chemicals results in long term health effects.

In China, safety standards are poor in agriculture and often unregulated, so no reliable statistics exist. That said, with reduced mechanization and poor working standards, injuries and deaths are likely far higher.

In China, safety standards are poor in factories also and often unregulated, so no reliable statistics exist. Factories also have dangerous chemicals.

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/inside-chinese-factories/

People did learn "don't stick your face in the thresher" and that's exactly why across cultures and in different time periods since the industrial revolution they migrated to the cities, because even the sweatshops we consider barbaric were better. In school, we learn about how terrible child labor was when it was unregulated, and how children were maimed and died in factories. But child labor was taken for granted on the farm, so of course it wasn't questioned when industrialization came at first. I have a picture of my mom as a little girl on a huge tractor in the 1940s. I didn't grow up on a farm, but her attitude towards power equipment when I was a kid was to tell me to read the manual, whether it was a power mower or a chainsaw or whatever.

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