Farmers are truly geniuses. They have to be a combination of agriculturalist, meteorologist, engineer, mechanic, handyman, builder, vet, hydrologist, and now we're adding technologist to that. They also generally have an amazing work ethic (getting up before sunrise, working in the blazing heat all day, etc). Not to mention dealing with disasters like diseases, weather events, accidents (lots of sharp blades, tools, etc).
Massive respect for them. Even with this tractor, this guy likely does more work than the majority of people. They feed our entire society with a ton of work for very little reward. We don't give them the respect they're due.
This is going to sound mean, but do you actually know any farmers?
At least in my area, they aren't exactly known to be geniuses. The ones that have built up their business by buying out other farms and have tons of acres and employees? Sure. The usual "inherited the family farm" type? Not so much.
They have two small periods during the year where they're up before sunrise and stop working after sundown, assuming they live in an area with one harvest. Overall they work a hell of a lot less than most of us, and have more money. I have a friend that owns a business where he sells side-by-sides, four wheelers, snowmobiles, etc. The amount that many spend by buying all the newest toys every year is incredible.
The downside, of course, is that you need to be born in to it. A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars, not to mention a ton of other startup costs. Land isn't for sale very often, as usually at least one child wants to take it up. I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
Note: I'm referring to crop farmers. Animals are hard work and I don't understand why any small time farmer still does it.
My impression is young farmers without land start with Animals because you can do it. Animals can live on land that cannot be farmed for row crops, and need much less land to make some money. so you buy some land - a few acres - then raise animals on that while working a day job someplace to pay the bills. As land becomes available you buy it, but sticking with animals as that is what you know. after 20 years of this you have enough trust with the banks to buy some row crop field that goes on sale. Another 10 years and you finally are earning enough from the farm to live without the other job and 10 more years and you can retire - letting your kids inherit a nice income from the mostly paid off farm (or sell the farm and retire to a nice life)
> I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
Well, you are not going to start any kind of business without some kind of working capital. To be rich, for some definition of rich, is always a necessity when starting a business. That is not exclusive to farming.
I'm not sure farming is any worse than any other business[1], though. I have started a number of businesses in my day and the farm was probably the easiest of them to get into. Like any startup without venture capital – you start as small as possible, prove the business model, and then slowly work towards growth.
> A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars
Ah, if only. Imagine how easy farming would be if 100 acres was only $1MM! We haven't seen farmland that cheap around here in 20 years.
[1] Maybe software has an edge if you can find success with nothing but a budget computer, but your time commitment is going to be many orders of magnitude larger, so I expect it still requires more working capital in the end.
I wasn't sure what current prices were, which is why I said north of. I know back 10 years ago I saw some for about $10,000 an acre, but for all I know it wasn't great land for one reason or another. I've also heard my region has some of the best soil in the world so I wasn't sure if my prices were generalized enough.
I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin (and I knew plenty of crop farmers as well, of course), and frankly none of what you said is congruent with my own experience. As orenlindsey said, farmers are generally smart people who have to juggle many hats and work their asses off in order to scrape out a very modest living. "Genius" is probably stretching a bit, but they aren't stupid laggards who get by on the inheritance they got from their parents the way you imply.
> The downside, of course, is that you need to be born in to it. A tiny 100 acre farm's land is worth north of 1 million dollars, not to mention a ton of other startup costs. Land isn't for sale very often, as usually at least one child wants to take it up. I don't even know how you'd approach starting from scratch unless you were already rich.
This is just flat out false. My dad started our farm (90 acres) from scratch. He did it by working his ass off, often working two or three jobs, while living frugally and saving as much as he could for a down payment. Then he got a mortgage, just like most people do when they buy property. It's hard in the sense that saving money is always hard, but it's certainly not impossible and something where you can't pull it off without a helping hand from your parents.
My parents bought a 60 acre property on a truck driver and part time school bus driver's salary. There's no way my wife and I could afford the same property today, even with us both having degrees. Land is freaking expensive now, and I assume farm equipment is also more than it was back then.
Don't get me wrong; I'm sure there are ways to do it, but I've known plenty of farmers and apart from hobby type farms they all inherited their land.
> Animals are hard work and I don't understand why any small time farmer still does it.
I guess it depends on the animal, and how many. I work sometimes on a hobby farm with around 30 pineywoods cattle and they're almost maintenance free. The hay is more work than those cattle and basically all we do for that is drive tractors around for a few days, a few times a year.
Hence "was CTO". The business in question was sold to the competitor in 2021. While the details of the transaction were undisclosed, said competitor received a funding round shortly before the deal was done for an amount far less than YC and friends invested in wholesalad's company. Needless to say it was almost certainly sold for pennies on the dollar. Hard to win over farmers when you don't understand them.
If you make some effort to expand your perspective, you'll find out that there is a whole world outside of the US, where people also practice farming and have been farming for a long time.
Wouldn't you find it arrogant – or at least weird – if people answered everything you write and say with the assumption that you're talking about British politics?
Not so. By definition, both in common usage and legally, the farmer is the owner. The farmer may also work in the operation, but that is not a strict requirement.
Calling someone who owns land and hires people to work it a farmer is like calling someone who owns a factory a "factory worker". In some technical sense maybe it's correct, but that's not what people mean when they use the term.
Not at all. Again, farmer refers to the owner. This is echoed in the dictionary as well as what is written in law.
The word people use for what you describe is farmhand. It is the farmhand who works on a farm. The farmhand is the agricultural equivalent of a factory worker. Indeed, someone who owns a farm, but does not work on it, would not be considered a farmhand, but they most definitely would be a farmer.
It is technically possible for one to be both a farmer and a farmhand, but being a farmer does not imply that one is also a farmhand. They are distinct roles.
I disagree. Farming has been the default job in human society for thousands of years - and still is, even today. There's nothing special about farmers, they aren't geniuses, the work is not that difficult - it requires effort, care and perseverance.
And this shouldn't be surprising. Farming is a very human activity, and can be done by pretty much any human. You don't need to be exceptional to do it. In fact it would be ridiculous if you did - imagine if only 1 in 50 people was brilliant enough to become a farmer - human civilization would never have gotten started.
Praising something like this feels silly to me, much as when people talk about "being a mother is the hardest job" or similar. It's not. Being a mother is a common human experience, and most women go through it.
This isn't to say such things shouldn't be celebrated. The idea of celebrations around harvest or motherhood is appealing to me, but there's nothing exceptional here, and there shouldn't be. Simple things, regular things, things everyone can do or goes through are worth celebrating, not just the exceptions, the geniuses, the stand-outs.
Being a parent is definitely harder that being a software engineer if you want to do a good job. Same for being a farmer. It isn't the default job anymore for a reason.
You could argue more women nowadays don't want to be mothers because it's hard. Especially if that's the second job and unpaid, actually you have to pay lots of money to be a successful mother. So yeah, it's exceptional... that anyone wants to have children at all! Though that's quickly changing, too.
> Being a parent is definitely harder that being a software engineer if you want to do a good job. Same for being a farmer. It isn't the default job anymore for a reason.
There's a difference between hard = effort, and hard = difficulty. Most people struggle to understand software engineering concepts. If you do understand them, then the effort required to succeed at the job is less than parenting/farming/etc; but there's a reason software engineers are in the top 20% of the economic ladder and picking vegetables on a farm is on the bottom.
And at last check, subsistence farming was still the default job worldwide. Perhaps things have changed in the last decade or two, but I have my doubts.
(I'd also take issue on the idea of parenting being difficult, vs. good parenting, vs. newer cultural expectations on parents/education/helicoptering, vs. kids being free to roam etc etc., but that's a whole huge discussion on its own - and I think there's a pretty strong argument to be made that raising kids is not harder on either axis than having a job, but doing both at once is very difficult and forces an economic choice many women are making in favor of money.)
As both a farmer and a software engineer, farming is way harder – and I don't mean in terms of effort. To your economic point, farming pays better too.
Sure, neither is hard if you want to do it at subsistence level. Hell, I started programming at like 5 years old. Software development is the easiest endeavour a human can partake in – so easy, it is easily picked up by young children who can barely read. Anyone can build software.
But I think it is far to say that building robust, reliable, maintainable, performant, and scalable software that satisfies a market need is a different story. And same goes for farming. If you want to farm at a level beyond subsistence, that is when it becomes hard.
I was kinda with you up until you started talking out of your ass about parenting, it is probably the hardest job I've ever done in my life, and I have had various physically and/or mentally challenging jobs.
The key to why parenting is such a hard job: it literally doesn't end for about two or more decades and you absolutely cannot quit or slack off on this gig, no matter what!
Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.
> The key to why parenting is such a hard job: it literally doesn't end for about two or more decades and you absolutely cannot quit or slack off on this gig, no matter what!
We might not like to admit it, but people can and do, all the time. There's an ideal as far as being a parent goes that we try to hold people to and enforce culturally - but that doesn't stop people from getting divorces or dumping their kids on their partner or parents while they go off and do their own thing. I know a number of people that more or less raised themselves - their parents provided necessities and that was about it.
There's also a larger discussion to be had on parenting and why it takes more time and effort than past generations; the difficulty of raising kids with two working parents; the move away from extended family groups and close neighbors that can help with kids; the increase in helicoptering/worrying and loss of independence; all of which contributes to making things more difficult.
> Just because something "always has been" doesn't mean it's easy.
I never said it was easy. What I said was it's not the hardest job, it's a common human experience, and it deserves celebrating even if it is an average, common thing.
> There's nothing special about farmers, they aren't geniuses, the work is not that difficult
This is absolutely laughable. The work is incredibly difficult. It literally destroys your body, every old farmer I've ever known has a heap of medical issues from having to do a lifetime of physical labor. It may not be intellectually difficult, but it's very difficult work.
I've recently picked up Farming Simulator on PS5, not so much because I'm into farming or anything but it's a great little game for shutting your brain off for a while. There's no point to the game, beyond just farming, which is great because you can pick it up and drop off whenever, you're not in the middle of some narrative.
Point being: they've put a lot of effort into modelling the different tractors and first time I used the in-vehicle perspective I was amazed at all the screens and knobs and dials and levers and what not. They don't really do anything in the game, it's just for show, but man they are complex beasts clearly.
Then again, I can definitely see the value of at least some of these features. Like you spend an inordinate amount of time just making sure you get maximum yield from a field, while keeping costs low, so having a screen tell you how much fuel you're consuming per turn or whatever is actually pretty useful.
Anyway, I absolutely agree – farmers are incredible! I have a whole new appreciation for farming equipment and farmers in general, just from playing this silly game.
I wonder how much it is like an aircraft - many many many dials and knobs, all with there purpose, but only a few needed in normal operation, or used once or twice a trip.
I assumed the purpose on an aircraft is a bit different: you don't want a "check engine" light to go on when you are 10 miles from the nearest landing strip. Probably a bit more detail is useful when a stalled engine means 50% odds of survival.
A decade ago I worked on the first version of the (current generation of the) main touch screen in John Deere equipment. I haven't watched the full video, but you can see it in some of the clips. Neat to think that some code I wrote a decade ago is likely still running on these things.
Massive respect for them. Even with this tractor, this guy likely does more work than the majority of people. They feed our entire society with a ton of work for very little reward. We don't give them the respect they're due.