This article is ridiculous. I’m a farmer and clearly I have time to surf the internet, and separating work from life is absolutely something I do - and my fathers before me. Grandma would’ve never put up with shop talk at the dinner table.
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.
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.