Farmers always worked from home
piszek.com
piszek.com
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.
IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance (as does owning most low margin businesses) relative to most office jobs but...
To say claim most farm labor was performed by slaves prior to 1865 flies in the face of the results of about half a dozen federal censuses and childhood mortality says close to nothing about the lives of the people who made it to adulthood.
For many in the US this meant a second occupation outside of farming, from preaching to making beer etc.
Summing up all of preindustrial farming covers a lot of area but for the major differences. Mostly vastly less land per farmer and minimal equipment, no insecticide and minimal fertilizers mostly animal droppings and marl applied early in the year. Limited and in many areas zero irrigation. This translated into less infrastructure, and fewer things to buy and thus maintain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marl
Really lack of resources was probably the biggest reason for lack of work. Logging, hunting, trapping, and fishing supplemented many early American farmers incomes but access to land for that generally wasn’t available in more settled areas.
This kind of assumes they did not needed cloth, bedsheets, candles and other produce. And especially making fabric is super time consuming. This also assumes animals don't need daily care outside of summer. No milking cows or goats, no animal feeding, no cleaning of enclosures.
The small kids did not needed care, feeding, watching. Food cooked itself.
I can’t see how it would be possible in pre-industrial time to have “not much to do” anytime of the year. Simply having the buildings stand up without falling apart is a surprising amount of work.
Nobody in my family history did anything but farming and joining the military btw
When pre-industrial farmers were not in the fields all day they were not idle. They were doing tedious low intensity tasks all day instead of doing laborious tasks all day. A large part of the purpose of Sunday being a day of rest in protestant religions is that if you don't convince people there will be literal hell to pay for not taking a day off they won't take a regular day off and they will work to the point of overwork and reduced output.
Even a naive napkin math estimation of the labor required to keep a 1810s farm house and barn maintained and a few work animals fed and watered should make it clear how much labor needed to be put in before you even get to the farming aspect of it. And it's not like your wife gets to share the labor since she has her hands full with feeding and clothing the family. Pre-industrial farmers did not have the luxury of factory made clothes nor grocery store butter nor a galvanized barn roof nor a tractor.
In the US most of these people were literate and we have enough written accounts that we can accurately reconstruct how they spent their time. It suffices to say that they didn't deforest the northeast and carpet bomb it with stone walls by working 40hr weeks.
At least in here, a lot of animal care was traditionally done by women. So did quite a lot of field work - a lot of it does not require that much physical strength. And clothing is quite serious time consuming work, really. The amount of time required to make the fabric is quite huge.
Source: I visited laundry museum once and it was pretty clear they have done it.
The switch to washday as in once a week washing cloth happened in period we talk about - after 1800. That is when you would spend one whole day in the week doing laundry.
Before that, you still had to do it, less often, but it took even more work due to lack of soap.
Really for most of human history washing clothes wasn’t that time consuming for average people. To the point where people today likely spend more time on it.
“And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall).
Which isn’t to say people didn’t get things done outside of work, but we don’t consider food preparation for example as part of the workday.
For example, in today's society we do not think of basic chores like laundry as work, but in the past laundry was far more labor-intensive due to the lack of washing machines. Is repairing your broken furniture or clothes work? Is preparing your own food work? Those things are trivialized in today's advanced capitalist societies, but might have been a substantial part of life for people in the past. Nowadays most people seem to just buy new furniture and clothes, and even food preparing has been substantially trivialized by resteraunts, orders, takeouts, and readymade meals, so we're probably much more prilvileged than they were. But did the medieval people saw all of this extra work as "work" in today's sense? (Graeber's famous book ("Bullshit Jobs") kinda touches on this aspect in the end chapter, but I wish he've delved a bit more on it. There's a whole anthropology of work that's left unexplored...)
I just think that even the conception of work itself might have been too different to compare medieval society's work hours to today's. We in modern societies are too accustomed with wage labor, to even imagine that these people might not have even thought about tracking the hours they were "working".
Similarly, food preparation generally involved minimal ingredients and as little effort as possible. Women where often working in fields or tending animals even with very young children, not spending 4+ hours a day in a kitchen.
Most peasant women probably spent virtually all of their spare time spinning yarn[1]. Most holidays weren't days where they completely stopped working; they were just days where they only did light, low-focus work that wouldn't preclude having a conversation, like spinning yarn.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
Most farming was smallholdings. So there was some sowing during specific seasons, harvesting hay (winter food for animals) but you also had animal husbandry, shearing of sheep, taking them to pasture, milking of cows, rudimentary veterinary items such as helping the cow give birth, snipping the hooves off sheep so they don't get infected, disinfecting parasites, thatching houses and buildings, building wattle fences, clearing bush, making beer, fixing carts, ploughs and other farm implements, preparing for festivals, preparing fruit and vegetables for winter (preserves) curing meat (for winter), collecting fuel, going to market, etc., etc.
You also either hired a blacksmith or you needed to make your own tools (hinges, nails, hitches, etc). all quite labor intensive. There was no "Rural King" or whatever to drive down to.
There was little "downtime". There was always something to do. Something was in disrepair.
Saying they only work a few weeks, is like taking someones code, counting the characters, measuring their typing speed and dividing the number to say that an average coder only works 5-15 minutes per day.
Also to clarify they definitely worked more than a few weeks a year, but rather the absolute limit on how much you could get done during planting and harvesting limited how much you needed to work the rest of the year. Maintaining extra fencing is as pointless as having 3 plows if you can only use 1. Starting a new farm is an extraordinary amount of work, but when people have been farming the same area for generations there is only so much to do.
It was essentially making use of the availability of labor not working on the land. It was prevalent between the 15th to the 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system
From the putting out system also emerged a network of proto-industrial business people enabling them to accrue the capital which would go on to become one of the catalysts of the Industrial Revolution.
Even so, these were times with no labor protections or modern civil rights. The putting out system wasn't an equitable system. People working in these systems often had to abide by the prices and conditions set by the businesses putting out the work to them. Child labor and domestic violence were part and parcel of life.
Thomas Hood poem "The Song of the Shirt" (1843) was published to raise awareness about the plight of the working poor at the time, notably homeworkers who easily fell prey to debt struggling to the point where they were forced to live hand to mouth. Charles Dickens would famously go on to deliver similar criticisms through his social novels.
"So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25.
And that's just a standard shirt.
And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving."
https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
> Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). These figures come way down once we get the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, but what seems fairly readily apparently is that women did not necessarily work less so much as produce more, selling the excess via the ‘putting out’ system we mentioned last time and using that to support their families.
“Between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold (the English population declined during the period due to the Black Death).” https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t... A lot of artwork is post spinning wheel which dramatically changed the economics of owning cloth.
This gets into some major differences over time. Leather or nothing used to be very common clothing choices globally. It’s only relatively recently that cloth has become so ubiquitous.
AFAIK this was very similar worldwide
> and within a fairly narrow window.
it applies for entire timespan since cloth weaving was invented till invention of spinning wheel and other that came really late.
For most of human history it applied.
Depends on your capital investment. Like anything, if you start with a lot of money it's a pretty sweet gig. If you're having to work an off-farm job to pay the mortgage then that balance can tip pretty quickly.
Similarly, business operations desk jockey for a multinational ag business is not a farmer.
I think the parent post was referring to those who perform physical labor on a farm and directly oversee that labor.
Yes, I am gatekeeping being a "farmer"
It remains that it is a pretty good gig if your capital costs are covered. I'm a farmer myself (I do the work, not just an investment), so I say that from first-hand experience. The amount you can make per hour of work is incredible, and the number of hours required per year are minimal. This isn't the olden days where you had to spend all winter in the bush in order to have heat. Pretty much everything is automated, outsourced, and outside of the peak season it is fairly hands-off.
The vast majority of farmers also work off-farm jobs to pay for those capital costs, however. That is where the work/life balance starts to falter. Both farming and working a full-time job can absolutely impact that balance.
I in no way want to invalidate your experience, but don't understand excluding the capital input costs and claiming it is lucrative. How many years did it take to break even on your capital investment?
Corn, soys, wheat, edible beans. Understandably, different types of farms will be different.
> Labor and management was year round with no off season.
In this northern climate there isn't much you can do in the winter under the blanket of snow, save animal husbandry. And even then I know quite a few farmers with animals who only keep animals through a portion of year exactly so that they can have time to themselves.
> don't understand excluding the capital input costs and claiming it is lucrative.
Funny things can happen, but as a rule your major capital is retained. Farmland, if anything, tends to increase in value. I don't find machinery depreciates much either (the new stuff becomes way more expensive instead). On the day you retire, you expect that you will get back everything you put in and then some. That is why most farmers are willing to work a second job to build up that wealth.
Input costs are, of course, already factored in to the income potential of the business.
It is a low margin business when you're trying to pay for land (mortgage or lease), but one that is covered, there is significant income potential (with all the caveats of farming being unpredictable). And yes, that income comes as a product of investing. That's what farming is all about.
Perhaps both of us are generalizing our experience to all or most farmers.
Regarding the capital discussion, the magnitude of the capital outlay and returns are relevant, even if capital value is retained. A $100k annual profit is good for a $1M investment, but crappy for a $10M investment.
Where for me rent is around 25% of revenue and would be more like 35% if I had to rent the acres I own. If you have the capital to buy your land, that's 35% of revenue you can realize as profit right there. The problem for the average Joe without capital is that if you are trying to rent or pay a mortgage, the profit diminishes very quickly. That is why it is pretty much impossible for regular people to enter the industry.
> A $100k annual profit is good for a $1M investment, but crappy for a $10M investment.
The growth in value of the business is most important, really. A $100k annual profit on a $10M investment is pretty good if the $10M investment is also worth $50M a decade later. That's what farmers bank on. Cashflow is necessary to keep things solvent, but not really why you're there.
It is no doubt one of those things that seems unsustainable, and funny things can indeed happy, but every decade I look back I kick myself for not investing more. At the end of the day it's pretty fun, though, so it's worth taking some risks just for the value of the enjoyment.
Probably should be 'these days'. I believe that's a function of modern mono cropping and corporate takeover that concentrates profit and turns a farm into an inhuman input output system.
I've known several small time farmers that had a bit of everything, and they were incredibly proud and very happy.
At least in Canada, farming in 1800s was a miserable and hard life. I don't think work-life balance came to mind for the settlers, more survive or perish.
edit: After posting I'm thinking of a couple of accounts of what farm life was like on Manitoulin island from back then. I can't get them out of my head so I'll write them here.
The first is the story of a farmer who one day finds that some of his sheep have been killed by a black bear. Now he has do something about it because the bear will keep returning until he has nothing left. He doesn't own a gun because guns and ammunition are expensive, so he borrows a trap (which is re-usable!) from a neighbouring farmer. He baits the trap with the carcass of one of the lambs that the bear attacked and waits. The next morning the bear is trapped but alive. What to do? He doesn't want to leave it like that, and he doesn't have a gun to shoot it, so he elects to finish it off with an axe. In the farmer's account he really did not want to do that but said that he had no choice in the circumstances. He still could have easily been injured by the bear and felt lucky that he wasn't.
The second account is of the local mail carriers. They were issued riles for self protection and in winter if they came across deer or elk they would shoot them and carry it into the next town in the wagon with the rest of the mail and parcels. The meat would then be cut up and distributed. It was noted that for many of the families it would be the only fresh meat they'd get to eat in the winter.
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
And based on what I know, it then went up due to cotton boom.
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.
> 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.
You have to split it to free states and slave states. Free states have no slaves no matter how grueling work. Slave states have split between slave work, feeman work and white people work, where white people would not do slave work due to it being considered shameful.
You have also industrial development going on in exactly this time - and decline of subsistence farming along with it.
My understanding is slaveholding was mostly by plantations (large farms engaged in commercial crops tobacco/cotton). Most farms were not plantations (or haciendas/fazendas south of the border coffee, sugarcane, mining). So most farms in the south had no slaves, but large plantations had many slaves.
Consider it hyperbole if it helps, but whatever the exact number, a whole lot of people living on farms were either dying as children or living in bondage, neither of which is a situation I would consider doing perfectly fine without mental breakdowns or help from Harvard Business Review. Even for the rest of the people, I somewhat doubt having most of your children die or being a slave driver was particularly great for mental health, either. Someone downstream also mentioned Native Americans driving down the proportion of slaves. Sure, but I also don't think having all your land gradually taken and your civilization hunted to extinction was great for mental health.
Whatever the exact numbers were in an era where we barely even tried to measure stuff like this, I believe this writer's rosy view of antebellum American life is badly out of touch.
This is false. 90% of the US were farmers. This is going to be subsistence farmers and people who own farms, sharecroppers, etc. The highest rate of slavery was around 10% of the total population, as the northern states had higher populations, though some individual states had very high rates of slavery.
a 1973 non-fiction book by Michael Lesy, based on a collection of late 19th century photographs by Jackson County, Wisconsin, photographer Charles Van Schaick – mostly taken in the city of Black River Falls – and local news reports from the same period. It emphasizes the harsh aspects of Midwestern rural life under the pressures of crime, disease, mental illness, and urbanization.
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.
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.
+1000.
For some of those their sense of entitlement to be an "expert" in unrelated field outstrips the actual capacity.
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.
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.
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 ...
- a lot of it is really "boss-self" balance. It's different doing things like farming where you're working hard for yourself versus having to be online to service the whims of someone else. Furthermore, the schedules of farming are imposed by the physical universe. You have to pick crops when they're ripe. The fact that this is non-negotiable and also physically obvious somehow makes it easier to deal with.
- "bullshit jobs" (Graeber passim): if you're not happy with the job, or its objectives don't make sense to you, then extending those nonsensical imperatives into the rest of your life just wrecks your happiness because you can't keep it in a timebox. Farming may involve physical shit, but at least the objectives imposed (e.g. harvest crops before they rot) are meaningful.
- reduced "life" options: farmers don't go out in the evening. Or the weekend. Or the holidays.
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.
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.
If anybody working for themselves would disagree with this thought, farmers are high on the list.
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
The problem is that you cannot discuss deadlines with chickens either: they have to be fed on time, or else.
That's the key point: If you are financially secure you will have less stress.
If you are not, you just change your dependence on a boss to a dependence on weather, bugs, pests and plant diseases.
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.
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.
We have two children and use every sq. ft. So much so that I had to convert our spare garage to an office, which isn’t included in the sq.ft. (pool isn’t viable year round!)
Typically the perspective I see in HN is from people with a primarily IT background, with an emphasis on FAANG-like or Silicon Valley-type companies. I know that HN’s audience is broader than that though, and it’s refreshing to come across a different point of view. I would have had the same reaction if several comments mentioned they were microbiologists. It’s just not what I normally see, and I’d be curious how they landed here too.
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.
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.
I lived like that during the first years of working remotely and it's both inefficient and unhealthy.
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.
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.
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.
Plow a field. Harvest something. Sheer the lambs. Fix the irrigation. Repair a tractor. Update the books. Apply for government grants. Fix a fence.
You might as well ask how the medieval world managed to maintain such a stellar CO2 balance.
But if you did, you'd be happy, you just know it. A simpler life, fruits of your labor and such.
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.
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.
Clearly it was planned this way but I thought it worked really well.
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.
Farming is hard and pays little.
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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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...
These companies are in fact doing hard science and engineering. For an example of your competition:
So yeah, form a startup but you need to be in the top of your science / engineering game. But everyone wants a more automated, cheaper, more reliable, less water usage, planting / growing methodology. Plenty of opportunity if you actually have something that's better than the status quo.
I don't think most people thought that the theoretical general farmer described is literally a crop doctor, but that they should know enough about it to know when to call in a professional, and when there are initial steps that might be taken to hamper or eliminate a disease before it takes hold.
Where I come from, farming is a pretty fulfilling endeavor. Both my parents left senior corporate roles to pursue farming because they love it so much. Even when they made their first money working, they bought a piece of land and were there pretty much every weekend. They started from working the farm themselves all the way to employing people. They are absolutely happy and have zero regrets about it. This is not an isolated incident either, a number of guys I went to school with have since started farming. It is not as lucrative for some of them as some jobs there were in, but they were very happy to leave their jobs and pursue farming full time. These are folk in South Africa, Australia, Zimbabwe, Ireland and a few other places.
In a lot of countries, you will find that many people work hard in day to day jobs so that they can eventually get a farm, move there and live happily.
The only way I can see someone successful in a farming endeavour is doing something super niche and hands-on that's highly profitable and doesn't require a ton of land. I'm thinking like apple orchards or vineyards. Additionally you could make your own specialist products and set up a small market to sell them. This is popular where I live.
That's not farming for a living. That is a hobby. Big difference.
> left senior corporate roles to pursue farming
> when they made their first money working, they bought a piece of land and were there pretty much every weekend
> from working the farm themselves all the way to employing peoplefrom working the farm themselves all the way to employing people
My interpretation of that is they bought the land and worked it weekends while they still had corporate jobs, but left those roles to focus on the farm, and now even employ people to work it with them.
That's not what I would call a hobby. It does seem to be farming for a living, given no alternative/additional jobs are mentioned.
In my experience, the biggest concerns are crop performance and government policy. All the farmers I know in california recently recently had their lives ruined when the state eminent domained their water rights without compensation. They lost their retirement, land value, 30 years of capital investment, and their entire life's labor. It is heartbreaking and I wouldnt be surprised if some of them commit suicide.
To be fair, the water rights in California were asinine, to the point that if you could connect to the aquifer you could take as much as you want, regardless of your size of land or need, and the collapse of the aquifers during overuse in drought caused entire cities to lose access to water as their wells dried up, and the farmers that could afford to dig deeper wells to access more water did so. Much of this was in support of farmers switching to more water intensive crops that were worth more (like almonds) because they could take advantage of the lax water rights of the state.
This has been a long time coming and reported widely and loudly for a decade now. Farmers in CA knew they had a choice over that time to either try to be part of a solution by switching to less water intensive crops and try to help (and possibly not be entirely caught unprepared as a major resource went from essentially free and unlimited to definitely not) but lose out on the additional income that granted them, or to continue to try to cash in on the status quo and make the problem worse but as a gamble because they could be caught out if it changes from under them, or to remove themselves from that market and do something else.
I don't wish death or suicide on any of them, but it's not like this isn't a problem they had no part in bringing about, or like the entire state should suffer because they wanted to keep the status quo, so my sympathy is offset to some degree by those facts.
If the state wants your house for public benefit, they have to pay you for it at market rate. They can't just size it and throw you on the street. The current implementation of the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (GWMA) is largely ignores prior ownership and is in conflict with CA property law.
[edit] The 2014 GWMA did not dissolve groundwater rights, but rather enabled the levying of arbitrarily high fines for exercising those rights. They don't have to use eminent domain to purchase the groundwater rights, but farmers cant use them. In this way, it hopes to let the sate have its cake and eat it too.
I suspect the implementation will eventually be overturned and revised by the courts, but not before most of the farmers harmed have lost everything.
As I stated, the way groundwater rights were before was brain dead. It makes no sense to buy partial rights when the use limits are "unlimited", and buying full rights means that the farmer can't grow at all, but even if you tried to do that the farmer would tell you to go to hell because you're how much are you offering for the alternative, which is a theoretical effectively unlimited amount of water?
I'm not going to defend the specific way they went about changing it, but I am going to restate that the water rights have been a complete mess since forever, farmers have been taking advantage of this in CA since it's been that way, and if they're getting the short end of the stick right now, well I'm not going to lose too much sleep since they've had such an awesomely good deal to this point and used it to put the entire state in a bad place.
I feel bad for anyone that started farming recently and got caught up in this (but really, they should have looked at the state of what what going on and reassessed), but for anyone that's been taking advantage of the situation for decades, you've got an uphill battle to convince me they deserve better.
For anyone that wasn't overusing water previously, I would like to hope they aren't being fined a lot or at all. I suspect that those complaining about large fines are probably people that have been extreme water users in the past. If not, I'm happy to hear of someone making a case they don't deserve their fines that has had both sides weigh in.
> but not before most of the farmers harmed have lost everything.
They gambled that there wasn't going to be a revision of water rights that stopped their overuse, and they lost that gamble. They all knew what they were doing. It was one of the biggest stories in the state for multiple years.
>As I stated, the way groundwater rights were before was brain dead.
On this we can agree
>It makes no sense to buy partial rights when the use limits are "unlimited", and buying full rights means that the farmer can't grow at all, but even if you tried to do that the farmer would tell you to go to hell because you're how much are you offering for the alternative, which is a theoretical effectively unlimited amount of water?
Groundwater rights are not unlimited in places where multiple people use the water. If you share an aquafer with others, rights are granted based on historic seniority and frozen at historic usage. If there is not enough water to support all of the users, water use is capped and the last new user loses their usage first. If a new user wants water, they can buy the rights to take X gallons/year from someone with the right. Historically, when cities grew or new farms moved in, they did just that.
Alternatively If you were the only user of an aquafer, you had the right to drain it dry. Like oil, gold, or other natural resources, you literally bought the rights to all of it with the land.
This was the precedent and is the law, so I think it is unfair to characterize the farmers as abusing the system, especially those that have been operating within their X gallons/year or priority rights. In some instances, it was even the state of California that originally sold them the right to X gallons/year in perpetuity.
Que 2014. The state mandated that all aquafers have neutral input and output by 2040 and this is where things get crazy. Instead of unwinding of usage based on priority of assigned groundwater rights per the law, commissions were set up to resolve the problem. The commissions don't have the legal power to take away the water rights, or the funds to eminent domain them, so the settled on selectively fining farmers for exercising their water rights as the least legally questionable path forward. These are the cases proceeding through the courts now. However, most small to moderate farms don't have funds for a decade of legal battle against the state.
>For anyone that wasn't overusing water previously, I would like to hope they aren't being fined a lot or at all. I suspect that those complaining about large fines are probably people that have been extreme water users in the past. If not, I'm happy to hear of someone making a case they don't deserve their fines that has had both sides weigh in.
The implementation is not to structured to curtail "overuse". "Fines" are a flat rate/gallon and set above 10x the possible revenue/gallon in some areas. This means there is no relief by scaling back. The point is to drive farms business out entirely. Many farmers offered to compromise by winding down their businesses, stop planting, and then fully pull up their farms and bring water usage to 0 by the 2040 deadline. This would keep them from losing their lives work, let them recoup costs, while meeting the state mandate. The state found this compromise unacceptable.
>They gambled that there wasn't going to be a revision of water rights that stopped their overuse, and they lost that gamble.
The farmers gambled that the rule of law would protect them and respect their groundwater rights, and in this respect, they were overconfident. I'm sure the largest users that are fighting will get paid out handsomely in settlement. However, the state probably saved billions by not buying the rights from the small farms and simply destroying their lives.
>They all knew what they were doing. It was one of the biggest stories in the state for multiple years.
They knew it was coming but had no possible exit strategy. Nut trees are profitable but have long lead times to return investment, especially smaller farms with lower profit margins. If your life savings and retirement are tied up in a non-fungible asset for 20 years, all you can do is hope.
That's at odds with that I understand was the norm. As I understand it, prior to 2014, if you had access to an aquifer, you could access as much of it as you wanted. No agency tracked or limited you in any way. The water board notes[1] that while the british unregulated system was deemed inappropriate in 1903, but that in most areas of the state landowners can use it as they want, and in a few southern California basins, it's controlled by court decrees. Notably, it doesn't seem like the appropriative or riparian rights systems that are used in water above ground is used in ground water rights.
If you have references to where some water use amount is specific and based on historic usage, and also not specific to subsets of California, then I'd be happy to review them.
> Alternatively If you were the only user of an aquafer, you had the right to drain it dry. Like oil, gold, or other natural resources, you literally bought the rights to all of it with the land.
If you mine, you own the rights to the area immediately under your property. You can't buy a mine entrance and mine the whole mountain behind it. Aquifers provide an unique challenge when considering them like mineral rights. Unlike an aquifur, if you mine the mineral resource in one area the relevant resource does not get pulled from subsequent areas you do not have the rights for to replenish it.
It makes no sense that a single plot of land can drain an entire aquifer as much as they want that may be many square miles, while the plot may be much smaller. People that live above the aquifer also have rights to that water, but their resource is being stolen.
> this is where things get crazy. Instead of unwinding of usage based on priority of assigned groundwater rights per the law
I'm still under the impression that for many, many areas, there are no specific groundwater rights between parties that specify use to unwind. If you're referring to the specific scheme in a particular county, as a state level regulation, I'm not surprised that it may barrel through those, but I also think trying to appease every individual county's system would be untenable.
> The commissions don't have the legal power to take away the water rights
They don't need to, if the state water board is to be trusted (but they are incentivized to not believe that, so if you have an alternative set of information I would be happy to read it). As the state water board presents it[1], "In the 1903 case Katz v. Walkinshaw, the California Supreme Court decided that the “reasonable use” provision governing other types of water rights also applies to groundwater." If that's the case, even though CA hasn't been regulating groundwater use much and in most places, doesn't mean they can't, and that's what they're doing now.
> However, most small to moderate farms don't have funds for a decade of legal battle against the state (as intended).
That's why there are special interest groups that I'm sure are behind a few cases to provide some muscle to try to get case law decided or some laws/regulation deemed unconstitutional. Every individual small farmer is not in an active case, they're waiting on bigger cases to come back with decisions they can use. I'm sure we both know how this works.
> The implementation is not to structured to curtail "overuse". "Fines" are a flat rate/gallon and set above 10x the possible revenue/gallon in some areas.
That seems like a good way to get farmers to stop growing water intensive crops and focus on crops that use much less water.
> This would keep them from losing their lives work and recoup costs, but this unacceptable.
Sounds a lot like people trying to get around the current regulations and changes in the hope it will all be reversed or changed in a year or two, in my opinion.
> The farmers gambled that the rule of law would protect them and respect their groundwater rights
I would say they gambled that the complete lack of state level regulation that they'd enjoyed to date would continue.
> They knew it was coming but had no possible exit strategy. Nut trees are profitable but have long lead times to return investment, especially smaller farms with lower profit margins.
And we've known for a long time that water was a problem, and the laws on the books are 6-7 years old at this time. Anyone that was planting nut trees a decade ago was taking a gamble they lost out on.
1: https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/about_us/water_boards_structu...
Although, I do still secretly think about raising cattle.. at least until season 2 of Clarkson's farm shows that that is also ungodly amounts of work for little return.
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.
(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.
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).
Maybe with a different distribution structure producers can get a bit more profits and people nicer / fresher products ?
I try to buy the coop sugar when I can.
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.
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.
source: grew up on a ranch. nearly every day involved working when I wasn't at school.