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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.