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I was thinking about how 1000 years ago most people were farmers, which seems like a fairly simple stress free life where you only work about twice a year, planting and harvest (if you are not a dairy farmer). I live in the country around many farms, have a large food garden myself, have farmer friends, and my grandmother and father grew up on a farm and told me lots of stories about it. From what I gather many farmers in the past had animals to help feed themselves but it was not a 8 hour job to feed and care for them. The farmers I know do perform "busy work" to keep themselves occupied but work at their own pace and I would not say it is extremely hard work. They do work very hard twice a year like I said. People today work every day, all day, in what seems like a modern form of slavery.
I was thinking about how 1000 years ago most people were farmers, which seems like a fairly simple stress free life where you only work about twice a year, planting and harvest (if you are not a dairy farmer). I live in the country around many farms, have a large food garden myself, have farmer friends, and my grandmother and father grew up on a farm and told me lots of stories about it. From what I gather many farmers in the past had animals to help feed themselves but it was not a 8 hour job to feed and care for them. The farmers I know do perform "busy work" to keep themselves occupied but work at their own pace and I would not say it is extremely hard work. They do work very hard twice a year like I said. People today work every day, all day, in what seems like a modern form of slavery.
OMG - you have no idea what it takes to run a farm. Talk to some others than your family- they sound like "gentlemen farmers" who own the land but hire and rent out everything they don't want to do. Especially if you have animals that have to be milked every day the hours are long and there are no vacations. Don't romanticize farming...especially in the time before machinery made farming "efficient". Backbreaking manual labor made a bit better by having all your kids work for you from the age of 4 on!
OMG - you have no idea what it takes to run a farm. Talk to some others than your family- they sound like "gentlemen farmers" who own the land but hire and rent out everything they don't want to do. Especially if you have animals that have to be milked every day the hours are long and there are no vacations. Don't romanticize farming...especially in the time before machinery made farming "efficient". Backbreaking manual labor made a bit better by having all your kids work for you from the age of 4 on!
I don't agree. Alot of farms had 1 or 2 cows and you could milk them quickly.
I don't agree. Alot of farms had 1 or 2 cows and you could milk them quickly.
Well, you didn't specify a "play" or "hobby" farm. If you only are "farming" a 25' x 25' garden the labor is really low too! Or if you have 5 acres of corn or beans, that could also be combined pretty quickly.
Maybe you need to specify how much farming would be required for you to regard it as "slave-like" as a "regular" job....thanks in advance.
Or maybe a better exercise would be to say if you expect this farming to at least provide enough for YOU to subsist on in terms of food or if you expect to grow crops or livestock that you could sell for enough to live on? Then someone could estimate how many hours of labor would be necessary.
Try living on a dairy farm, you can NEVER, leave for very long. Cows need to be milked a couple of times daily, every day. My father couldn't wait to get away from my grandparents farm!
Wasn't the whole point of Daylight Savings Time to extend the number of "workable" hours to almost 16 hrs a day for agricultural communities?
That does not sound very "cushy" to me!
The husband (now 60) got pulled out of school for the duration of the school year at Spring Break from the ages of 8 until he was 18. He said his dad would shave his head & send him to Kansas (we live in Colorado) to work the family farm, not to return until September.
Can you imagine todays teen agers doing this (let alone an 8 year old)?
We are seeing a disturbing number of posts on CD ultimately just whining about having to work. If the OP was bright, he could have compared traditional jobs with modern jobs, but no.
Too many young people trying to justify not working methinks.
I find it funny people can't have a intellectual discussion about this and are acting like kids.
That's because you purveyed a child's level opinion. They are right. You don't really have a clue of how much work there is involved in modern farming--and certainly not how much work there was in pre-mechanized farming.
I think the human connection and the nature connection makes a difference. I'm pre-morning coffee so not going to go any detail this early. But I believe those two factors contribute to job satisfaction.
People weren't meant to live in steel enclosures and work under unnatural light, breathing conditioned air and surrounded by brick, concrete and electronics.
And the very nature of farming meant an interdependence which fostered learning human cooperation and working toward a common goal. Natural settings and a connection with nature can be soothing to humans.
I was thinking about how 1000 years ago most people were farmers, which seems like a fairly simple stress free life where you only work about twice a year, planting and harvest (if you are not a dairy farmer). I live in the country around many farms, have a large food garden myself, have farmer friends, and my grandmother and father grew up on a farm and told me lots of stories about it. From what I gather many farmers in the past had animals to help feed themselves but it was not a 8 hour job to feed and care for them. The farmers I know do perform "busy work" to keep themselves occupied but work at their own pace and I would not say it is extremely hard work. They do work very hard twice a year like I said. People today work every day, all day, in what seems like a modern form of slavery.
For 80 years, my father and grandfather rose at 5 AM to milk, seven days a week; the process had to be repeated every day at 5 PM. In between, they worked in the fields under a hot sun. Days that weren't suitable for field work involved jobs like manure removal, and in the earlier days, a lot less of the work could be mechanized.
Work at your own pace? You had to work harder to complete the job when nature (the weather) permitted it. Property taxes and other expenses had to be paid, successful crop or not. About the only positive was that over-sensitized suburban idiots weren't permitted to interfere in your business because they didn't like the smell, or appearance, or whatever.
Like so many today, the OP has no grasp of the gap between "farming" as a hobby, and real agribusiness, under the prying eyes of sheltered overgrown children who refuse to grasp the hard facts. (S)he can now prattle about "organic faming" or other eco-nonsense as much as (s)he wishes, but (s)he'd better take a closer look at his/her shallow thinking before the next trip to the supermarket.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 11-04-2016 at 08:04 AM..
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