Every time this topic comes up I say the same thing. If you've never worked on a farm and have some kind of romantic idea about it then you shouldn't do this. Farming is hard work. Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
If you're thinking of doing this and do not have experience go work on a farm for a year before you buy in.
Maybe they have saved enough from working in tech that they can grow vegetables for themselves in a very low scale way. Its nice to escape from the career you've had for decades. Sometimes its not even an escape from the career, but the career and the city you've lived in. Moving to the forest and growing some vegetables and raising chickens isn't that difficult. You certainly don't need "millions in equipment". Its exactly what I did.
I found it difficult to get a job in tech at the start of COVID after working in it for ~25 years. I moved to Michigan, and now live in the woods. My Cost of Living is a fraction of what it was. My mortgage is only 80% of what I was paying for rent in the SFBay area. Its peaceful and quiet here. It actually gets dark too. I no longer hear BART screeching on the rails at 2am or the constant flow of traffic. I.. do once again work in tech though at a much 'smaller' scale. My company is small and work demands don't dominate my life. I have balance.
This year I've planted ~200 onions, ~100 potatoes, ~100 garlic, ~60 strawberry. I have blueberry from a few years back starting to flourish. I have wild blackberry, and mushrooms galore. "touching grass" is a daily activity as we manage our small flock of chickens.
The woman who ran PR for Chicago Tribune did the same thing with her husband. She now has a small farm in Michigan. She runs a PR agency from the farm.
I personally couldn’t do it… I prefer loud noises and bright lights but I lived in Rincon Hill and Times Square at various times…
It's always interesting to hear from people who moved to Michigan because the better part of my adult life has been devoted to getting out of Michigan. It sounds like you have a peaceful life though
Funny comment about it being dark in Michigan. My feeling here in the summer is like, will the sun ever set (somewhat light out until almost 10pm depending on location)? I know what you mean, of course.
Michigan might be cool in summer, what about winters? I need find a place for summer as I'm getting older and texas is just darn hot for 4 months in summer.
That's one type of farm. Depending on someone's financial situation and expectations, there are certainly other types. Taking up farming does not necessarily suggest that you're going to compete in the highly competitive world of agribusiness. I personally know a smaller-scale farmer who has a biodynamic farm and provides a high quality of life for his family. He has not invested millions in equipment to make this happen (not even close), but he certainly works hard. There's no debating that.
Every time this topic comes up a rhyme of your comment bubbles to the top and speaking from my own experience growing up in a winery. I can say: yes, it's hard, but no, it's not impossible to take up later in life. Stop assuming he just threw away his notebook and bought a tractor and stop spreading coffee table knowledge. Let people discover things for themselves, or even better, try finding things out for yourself. Because maybe, just maybe, you might discover that our differences are what make us unique and capable of achieving things in our own ways. There is no best practice for everything or everyone.
This needs to be the top reply. I know many people who have taken up homesteading while also keeping a foot in tech. They want to grow their own veggies and fruit, raise their own chickens, etc. They want to be closer to nature. And by and large they succeed.
I didn't say it was impossible. I was saying that you need to understand the realities of something before dedicating significant resources to it. If you discover you love farming then by all means go for it.
There's also the old joke about the farmer who wins the lottery. "I'm going to keep farming. And when the money runs out I'll find another way to keep farming."
I almost experienced this for real, when I was a kid I was working picking grapes in a vineyard and it was a terribly maintained one, you had to bend over and kneel etc. At the time the highest jackpot in history came up in my country, something like €50M
At some point the owner told us "I'm sorry guys, we'll fix this field. If I win the lottery, I'm gonna fix all of this, and I'm gonna hire a bunch of hot brazilian dancers to entertain us while we work".
It didn't even occur to him that he could stop doing it.
I read someone who retires and "takes up farming" as retiring to a house in a rural location and maintaining a garden and maybe some small quantities of livestock.
IE someone who is not depending on the "farm" to be a commercially successful operation or is even attempting to run it as a profitable business.
30 years ago this garden was the only thing that helped my family and millions other people survive when USSR crashed. 600 square meters planted mostly with potatoes provide enough food for family to survive winter and next summer and even sell something. And it's not that hard work, because people usually had their main work for some tiny money and maintained garden before and after work.
I think that everyone should own some land to feed himself in the event of economy fallout.
That's how I read it. Farming doesn't have to mean planting thousands of acres of soybeans and corn and hundreds of head of cattle.
A large garden, some chickens, and perhaps a few goats are more than enough to keep a hobbyist tinkering all day, and is still what I'd call 'farming', though YMMV.
> In the U.S., a high proportion of farms might be classed as hobby farms. In 2007, over 40% of farms reported less than $2500 in income and over 10% of farms had less than 10 acres (4.0 hectares) of land
Yep, it's insanely easy and cheap to sustain a family if you have land, a bit of time and two brain cells, but it's insanely hard and expensive to run a successful modern large scale farm
A lot of people are heavily influenced by Youtubers and other influencers who conveniently leave out the earnings they get from their Youtube views, all while selling a romantic, self sufficient dream of living in harmony with nature.
In that regard Jeremy Clarkson paints a much more realistic picture, even though that show is very over the top and mostly scripted.
I grew up on a farm and was on track to take it over. I know how hard it is. And it was not the live I wanted, so I pivoted to online marketing and web development instead.
I really like Goldshaw Farm[1]. He does yearly breakdowns how is farm performed and the reality is he could not live at all if that was his only income stream.
And I think his scale is most realistic what a developer could achieve when he quit and just wanted to try to farm.
I was the only grandkid interested in the family farm at all and stood to inherit the whole works.
I went to college instead and work a regular job. Grandpa has been on that farm since he was born in 1922. Until he retired in 2006, he took two days off work the entire time.
I’m a programmer with a degree in Agricultural Science so my opinion is oddly relevant to this subject. Please shut up and stop shitting on people’s dreams. Not everything is about profit and scaling. Anyone can and should learn to farm regardless of their background or education.
That was my point. That they should learn about it before committing to it. I was in no way saying someone shouldn't do it if they discover it's something they enjoy.
It's the two extremes of work. One is hard physical work directly associated with producing the things you need to stay alive, the other is purely intellectual work which is 20 levels of abstraction away from your necessities.
> Farming is hard work. Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
It depends on the scale, I know 80+ years old people living in the countryside, still splitting their own wood, growing their own garden/orchard, manually removing potatoe bugs from their decently sized potatoe field, cutting grass with a scythe, taking care of their chickens/goats/sheeps... they're 100% self sustained and use tools from the 19th century they inherited from their parents. They're in better physical and mental shape than most code monkeys I know while being 50+ years older
> I know 80+ years old people living in the countryside ...
I do too, and not a single one of them is happy about it. Every person I talked to, starting from my grandparents, wants to move to a city where heating etc is taken care of for you, but in their age it's easier to continue doing what they've always been doing instead of enduring massive changes like that.
I've met an 80+ year old farmer who looks old and frail but raises calves and keeps 80 hives, and he moves those fully loaded hive boxes like it's nothing. It's rather surprising the first time you see it.
I see this kind of comment every time someone decides to take a different path. Pessimistic sounds smart I guess. Well, you are wrong. I have done it myself, started a farm on a whim a couple years back, and did just fine! And no I don't know what hard work you're talking about, I'm much healthier than I was sitting at a desk all day long.
My Thai girlfriend enjoys her farm, spends a couple of hours a day to work on it.
Of course, it's not our primary source of income, as that is my work as software engineer. For her it's a nice hobby.
I don't think you'd need a degree anyhow. Plenty of stuff can be learned online these days. And you don't need a lot of equipment either, if it's just to take care of yourself or your family. Depending on your community, you might also be able to rent some equipment if you need it at times (my girlfriend rents some equipment, tractor or some such with a driver, to cut the rice, about 2 times a year, as do most people in our village).
If you have a bit of a garden, can easily start as a hobby, I think.
You don't need a degree, but if you want to make a good living while farming you need to compete with people who have both a degree and millions in capital invested.
Farmers can make a lot of money, or at least somebody does. A single family Saskatchewan dryland wheat farm is typically worth $10M in land and equipment so either the farmer makes enough money to pay the interest on a multi-million dollar bank loan or enough money so that continuing to farm is preferable to retiring and living on the interest.
The problem is of course the variability due to weather and wild swings in commodity prices. A farm can produce a high six figure income one year and lose six figures the next.
But as you noted, if you're not looking to pull six figures per year from your farm, then it does become quite a bit simpler.
>Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
Are we talking industrial scale? Because not every farming venture needs to reach that, and most smaller farmers don't have "college degress and millions in equipment".
And you can pick up a lot in a couple of years, I've had friends who made the switch (and extended family who worked on farming).
Not in the US though, but judging from the decent sized subculture of "living off the grid" (or close), it's probably even easier there.
Farm doesn’t always mean hundreds of acres and millions in loans. My neighbors across the street are farmers and live in a residential neighborhood. They have a quarter acre in the front yard for growing veggies and own a 1 acre plot just outside of town.
At some point sitting at a computer becomes unfulfilling and some point some people can’t take it anymore.
I read "Have taken up farming" as "I now make a living from farming and nothing else". Maybe that was wrong of me to assume that but I was also thinking that's what the parent comment was referring to as well.
They are not farmers. They have a quite serious hobby (and some savings or other income to rely on probably). It's impossible to make a living out of a 1.25 acre of arable land.
Yes, if you want to subscribe to the stereotypical unsustainable practice of running a mega farm. There is plenty of opportunities for farming on a small scale and selling your products locally or online.
I'm a little bit in touch with this particular demographic, and from what I've seen this has nothing to do with romanticism, and instead everything to do with a profound mistrust in technological civilization's ability to feed everyone into the near term future. Much closer to some sort of extreme insurance policy than anything else. There are systemic economic problems that can't be hand-waved away at this point.
Interesting side topic: did you know that while John Deere's top of the line combine is well over $1 million retail (and of course everyone else's models are similarly priced), that a model 42 combine from the 1960s will still go for under $1000 at auction, even as recently as last October, and is more than sufficient to harvest oh, probably even up to 50 acres over a few days? If one sells wheat or oats or whatever, there's no way to compete at market but if one only wants enough wheat to feed themselves for the coming year (and not have to buy seed again next), it's some absurdly small acreage. You might need like a fifth of an acre. There's still plenty of hard work, but mechanization solved some of the worst parts of that before we were even born.
You are thinking of big ag doing stuff like corn and beans with a combine. Farming can be as big or small as you want it to be. You can be a farmer on 1 acre of land. This is not a good take.
Corn or dairy cattle, absolutely. Oranges for concentrate, sure. Even cabbages for transport, right.
But there are other things there's demand for, or demand can even be created for, that do not have such vast efficient scales. Hand-reared escargot, or spinach grown within resonance of a woodpecker pecking at dawn, just two examples.
Funny how nobody ever says the same about software, which underpins the entire modern economy and has the power to irreversibly change the lives of billions.
If you want to make a solid living farming, then sure. However, hobby farms that break even or even lose money also exist and are probably the majority by sheer number. "Farming" can be as big or as small as you want it to be.
Distant family member of mine started a hobby farm in retirement and lived on it for probably 30 years until his death. He lived off his pension and savings, not his crops.
What you describe is how corporate farming is done in the United States. There are millions of people in Mexico, for example, who are farming, and they do not have college degrees or millions in equipment. They also work sunup to sundown, every day, with no vacations. "Right to repair" and John Deere are alien concepts to many of them.
This is a terrible, terrible misconception about what constitutes a farm and farming!
Yes you can 'farm' on an industrial scale, or you can 'farm' on your parking strip. You're right when it comes to the former, and couldn't be more wrong when it comes to the latter.
That's the same line of advice I give in most disciplines:
> Student: I've struggled with math in the past, what do I need to do to be ready for your class?
> Me: Take the previous class first. You'll get easy A's in both, you'll actually understand the material when you need it, and there's no real downside since you have a minimum of 120 credits to fill to be able to graduate anyway.
In some ways it ties into the "big fish in a small pond" theory of life. People who take that sort of advice have easy, stable lives. I'll keep giving it. Likewise, most people probably shouldn't jump into farming unprepared.
That said, life is short, and a year is a long time. If you can stomach the downside risk (losing every dime you poured into farming, having to work hard at it), by all means just jump in. There are vibrant communities willing to teach you everything you need to know, and you'll learn faster working on real problems you're personally experiencing than rote memorizing the tasks a seasoned master tells you to do.
If you want to mitigate some of the risks, perhaps start with something small enough you could manage it without millions in equipment (high-margin products like mushrooms and arugula -- and if you go with those, focus on distribution as a primary concern).
To be fair, most devs leaving the software industry won't have half the type of problems that actual farmers have - they have money, so they don't have the same pressures and they are typically doing some kind of boutique product.
I would love to "farm", but only as a retirement "job", and only with specific products.
My bias is not to go directly to factory farming or industrial agriculture, which sound depressing. I'd rather a smart and lazy approach, helping the land recover to a point and then stopping succession, as has been done with fire in the PNW mountain meadows for berry crops. I'm not under the illusion that the land-management practices of the Nisqually or Puyallup, say, didn't involve consistent work, just a different sort of work, one more within individual and small-group control.
If petroleum-fueled agriculture is "necessary", it's a mess we've gotten ourselves into.
I would like to learn more about the trash cooperative.
I’ve had a few ideas in the direction of collecting certain types of trash to recycle (eg: food waste, garden waste, paper/cardboard) due to a personal interest in composting and related topics.
There’s certain stuff though that I have no idea how to recycle (yet). Would one negotiate with a larger waste management company for these items? Or simply offer it as a way for neighbours to reduce their trash collection bills?
Everyone thinks they're a born farmer until their first horn worm.
"I love tomatoes! I'm going to grow my own!"
wow what a coincidence so do these little baby moths
Don't get me wrong, growing your own food is neat, but you're going to trade the money you'd spend on veggies for time and effort trying to keep even a small back porch of plants alive. You have to be fastidious about everything from soil maintenance/security (from pests) to pesticide application.
When I started to study English many years ago, my mom gave me a book series titled America Today or something like that. The book was life changing as it made learning English so much easier than the Chinese way at that time and it taught me a lot about the US. The book 3 devoted many chapters to a day in someone's life, one of which is A Day in the Life of a Farmer. At that time, the US was the beacon of the modern civilization to Chinese people, a superpower that was far ahead of everything we did. And despite that the work of a farmer was still tough. They still needed to get up at 4:00am or early to take care of their livestocks. They still had to take care of their crops before the sun fully rose. They still had to handle many issues about their land, their equipment, and their business. They still had to do tons of intense manual labor. Despite all the toughness, though, the chapter also conveyed the idea that farming can be gratifying and fulfilling. I certainly appreciate this kind of optimism and appreciation, and the life an American farmer has a lasting impression until this day.
Running an industrial farm that makes money efficiently is different than living on a plot of land with chickens and cows, giving you a cheap lifestyle.
I agree, and I say the very same thing about software engineering. Yet there are plenty of managers who hire unqualified people coming from a 6 week coding bootcamp into teams with highly complex requirements and very skilled, experienced devs. So from that perspective, one would propably think that a 6-week farming bootcamp also gotto be enough :)
If it’s commercial farming, yea it’s not fun. Exposure to many chemicals/pesticides/herbicides. Animal cruelty on a daily basis — those poor chickens and cows stuffed into tight spaces.
But if it’s for sustaining yourself, it’s not so bad.
Personally, the only “farming” I would pivot into is vertical farming. The idea of turning what would normally be a massive operation out in the country into a self sustainable, climate controlled operation in an urban environment is fascinating to me.
Optimize crops for taste rather than pest or weather resistance. Combine it with the fact that transportation can be reduced significantly; and it’s a recipe for a circular and self sustainable ecosystem.
A lot of actually viable commercial farms where I live are smaller than many hobby farms in the US, for a start.
What a lot of people mean when they say they are quitting to take up farming is pretty much hobby farming - where you may break even or turn a miniscule profit, but the main “goal” is to simply become a bit more self sufficient and do it for some sense of enjoyment.
The interesting thing is some small “hobby farms” are effectively experiments in permaculture or other forms of regenerative “living” that can be extremely cost efficient or even profitable.
I think this is a negative approach. This is an open source developer who donated his time and energy over years for practically free. The reason he is quitting open source development in favor of farming is because farming is a more rewarding experience.
The number one killer of open source projects is funding. It is demoralizing to spend years on something that isn't going to really put food on the table, and we do not live in a society that allows us to fully chase our hobbies and passions with complete abandon to that fact.
Speaking personally, being that most of my work is "virtual", I take up as much physical work as I can, and even create some out of curiosity.
I miss the physical world and being able to touch and understand mechanical objects. In time I have become a decent bike mechanic and I can do some plumbing and electrical work.
This is just to say that some of us end up craving contact with the physical world more, not less.
To be fair, I suspect they meant it in a more idiomatic sense. Not that they literally went farming. Sort of like when one says "water under the bridge" they aren't commenting on bridges, nor water.
I have done the farm thing for a while (gf to that time had a family farm). While manual labor can be rewarding, I have to say I was often bored out of my mind. And I usually never get bored.
Not everyone is taking on farming as an alternative line of work.
I know a dev who's stopped working in his 40s (made huge money by being in the right startup at the right moment) and took up on farming, but not as a mean to survive rather than "fun".
He even ended up having quite some profit after few years by focusing on exotic edibles for gourmet restaurants, but obviously he doesn't make anywhere near the money he did as a developer, but he does love his life.
I can't lie, I aspire to do kinda the same and pick up on farming, but just for myself and family. The food industry is beyond disgusting and you just can't trust what you're eating, no matter how deep your wallet it.
Maybe. But when I think "tech" the first thing that comes to mind isn't "sustainability". The first things that come to my mind are "cost, maintenance, consumption and waste".
There’s a lot of interesting methods you can combine with tech stuff to do things like aeroponic towers, composting, mycology, etc.
For example: a “enclosed” mushroom growing op (a few sheds or cabins) can be made incredibly efficient using various sensors, automation solutions, and environmental controls to maintain the optimal growing environment. It can be as complex or as simple as you want.
Sorry but this is not the case everywhere. Some countries subsidise their farmers because they correctly determine that this type of industrial farming you describe is terrible for the environment.
I grew up in a farming community, and whist it can be rewarding, if you are trying to make money, or be self sufficient, its fucking hard work.
Is it harder than programming? thats a subjective call. Objectively its physically harder work, mentally its way more varied. You need to be a welder, plumber, vet, horticulturist, builder, metrologist, and if you're doing properly, crooked accountant as well.
Would I take up farming? probably not. Would rather become a water mill owner? hell yeah.
> You need to be a welder, plumber, vet, horticulturist, builder, metrologist
I love this about farmers. They are the polymaths of our age and folks dont get it. Farming YouTube is a trip because there's more tech in a tractor than in some startups.
> and if you're doing properly, crooked accountant as well.
Yea, most people dont get what a "future" is, and why corn and lumber have them (but not onions... thats a lesson too)... The farm has the support of a lot of high finance and hedging exists not just as an instrument but has a purpose.
Ask a farmer about a grain/pork "Marketing Plan" and who they are hiring as advisors and where that person got their degree...
It's a complicated world and there are some interesting intersections out there.
> Yea, most people dont get what a "future" is, and why corn and lumber have them (but not onions... thats a lesson too)... The farm has the support of a lot of high finance and hedging exists not just as an instrument but has a purpose.
Not many farmers I know (in an ag community) understand what a future is either, or would even know how to trade them. That's the domain of hedge funds, not farmers. (And, if they tried, they'd probably lose. It's not much different from me trying out day trading.)
The fruit of a farmer's work is not futures trading. It's trying to keep things alive long enough to make a small profit.
> You need to be a welder, plumber, vet, horticulturist, builder, metrologist
Not sure how commmon this is anymore. The age of the family farm with a mix of livestock, rotating crops, and woodlands are long gone in the developed world. Each of these tasks would be handled mostly by a professional in any serious farming operation.
Economics and polymath abilities aside. There is significant risk of bodily harm in farming. Humans, machinery, and chemicals create a potential deadly mix. The risk often captures children and amateurs as they have lesser developed farming knowledge and skills[1].
>I love this about farmers. They are the polymaths of our age and folks dont get it.
Letting it get too complicated risks losing all of the small-scale farms because then only large companies will have the scale and aggregate skill and money to farm. Tight margins means they might decide to quit and go do something else given the amount of skill and work required for so little profit.
Being a farmer and not owning the land that you work is soul crushing.
I don’t know the details of this person’s situation, but farming is much more enjoyable when it’s done as a semi-retirement hobby than as a way to bootstrap one’s career.
The farmers I know in my family all struggled mightily because every year was about accumulating a little more capital so they could rent some more land or buy the next piece of equipment they needed to grow in a few years.
The people who do it as a semi-retirement after a different career often come in with funds to buy land (as an investment) and have some working capital up front. When the goal is more about getting any positive number out of the farm to offset property taxes and you’re not running it like a business where squeezing every penny out of rented land with rented equipment is the only way to make it to next year, it’s a very different experience.
Hopefully this person is lucky enough to be in the latter group and have this be more hobby than bootstrapping a farming enterprise.
Really this is if you're trying to be a high-volume commercial farmer. Homesteading is still hard work, but if you're growing food for just you and your family, it's a much less exacting science that requires much less equipment. It is startling how much a garden of various veggies and starches wants to grow and only needs a bit of help from you. Throw in some chickens and you've got a fairly big boost to your family's organic nutrition.
> if you're doing properly, crooked accountant as well
Don't know if it was intentional, but this maligns some of the hardest-working and down-to-earth people that I've ever known as crooked.
But perhaps this is just referring to taxes, but farmers are also not incented to fudge too much on their taxes: they receive subsidies, and very little is paid with cash anymore, so is easily tracked.
Sadly, most farms today are huge corporate operations, so perhaps that's what you're talking about, but out of the less than 25% of the remaining family-sized operations, most are not wealthy by any stretch. Perhaps that's what they're doing "wrong".
I think one of the reasons you can't really be crooked as a farmer is because it's a small community and everyone knows everyone else. If you rip someone else off, everyone will know. It's much easier to be crooked in a bigger city where there's another sucker born every day.
> Don't know if it was intentional, but this maligns some of the hardest-working and down-to-earth people that I've ever known as crooked.
you misread me.
I don't mean, they rip off other farmers, I mean subsidy farming.
In the UK there were such things as flying herds, that were bussed in when inspections were due. Do they get rich from it? fuck no, does it allow them to survive, it did, until the UK government threw them under a bus.
To me the most interesting thing about this is that his github history shows he really gave up in 2021, with almost no commits since then.
I don't know enough of the context of these repos, their significance or ongoing use, but it feels weird to return just to archive en masse. I think it might actually be the least worst option - leaving it open as if you might return gives a false sense of the project, and passing to a successor is a lot of work.
We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.
> I think it might actually be the least worst option - leaving it open as if you might return gives a false sense of the project, and passing to a successor is a lot of work.
IMO that's exactly it, the guy wanted to give a strong signal and not string people along. That I respect a lot.
> We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.
I don't know who is "we" in your sentence but "we the working programmers" are busy as hell and most of us are not as privileged to basically wonder what do we do with our time. Whoever has the time and energy and if they can muster the motivation, please help -- the OSS world desperately needs much more people, and has always needed them. The rest of us who have to prioritize well-being and family are excused for wanting to spend a few leisure hours a day.
> the OSS world desperately needs much more people, and has always needed them.
Nah. Even after reading the Roads and Bridges Report, I disagree with this.
People are naive and too nice, and that's the problem that needs fixing, not reality.
The reality is that you shouldn't do open source work unless you just want to help Microsoft's AI.
Just kidding.
The reality is that you should do open source work without expecting compensation, and anyone that wants you to "maintain" things should be told that's not how it works. How it works is they should fork it and maintain it themselves. Tough, right? Well, it's free code. That's the price THEY pay for it. Making the person who gave it to you for free pay for it is asinine.
It's also asinine to imagine a world where humanity works differently. Roads and Bridges recommended some kind of invasive tracking to be able to figure out how much money an open source project is hypothetically worth to be able to report that to corporations to beg for money to monetize open source more easily (and, of course, help "diversify" it by seeing how many unicorns are doing development and keep that in a PR spreadsheet somewhere), but you can sense that all of this is false dharma. You're doing it wrong. It needs no help or money or diversity; look at all it's given us without any of that. It just needs to be used correctly.
The free software movement started by programmers, for programmers. The expectation is that the user can read the code, fork the thing, and do what they want with it. But in our eagerness to have our cake and eat it too, we imagine non-technical users have some right to demand that the developer fix the code they offered us or change it to implement some feature. And, misconditioned as they are, the devs play along and feel the onus is on them to appease that rabble, and then they get burned out.
> I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...
As we argue over which of the software engineers in this thread knows more about farming, are we totally sure that statement isn't, at least in some sense, a joke?
My immediate first assumption was "he's retired from doing this and this statement is a reference to doing something very much not IT related, like goat herding or farming." I haven't moved from that assumption yet. :D
I mean yea, I read this as an idiom for "went to do something wholly unrelated to programming". Not as "I literally am going to begin farming". Like I would read anything from "restaurant owner" and "artist" to "flight trainer" and "corporate DJ" as all fitting under that.
20 years ago I read a few Wendell Berry essays on agriculture and it changed my life. I immediately believed two things: 1) if it wasn’t for computers I’d be an agrarian and 2) I finally had a better idea of conservatism in the sense that nature selects for conservative agrarians.
These ideas challenged my ideas of “turning it off and on again” and overall system design. I needed to prove to myself that I was more than a brain, and I was more than the “kid that was good with computers.” What was my body for?
I quit my virtualization/sysadmin job and moved to a farm in central Wisconsin, helping a small family with 4 acres of veggies for market, milked 20 goats and 2 cows, turkey, sheep … the whole works.
Farming didn’t work out long term for me but it taught excellent lessons and gave me a better foundation for understanding my satisfaction of being human, e.g. is the grass greener on the other side of the fence?
A lot of things "for fun" are probably ok. The difficulty comes when you don't enjoy / tolerate the hard problems that come with doing it for an income.
Programming for fun is great too. Hit a problem that's not something you enjoy? Drop the project and move on.
The "its fun" vs "I don't tolerate these hard problems that come with the skill" is a significant disconnect that people have and one of the things that generates a lot of people starting something (be it a project or a career) and not moving up on it.
> ... Then I went off to college to study architecture... and found that, while I liked many things about the field, I didn't really like to do the grunt work that is part of the architecture student's life, and when the assigned projects got more challenging, I didn't really enjoy working on them.
> But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles.
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
> I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more compelling motivational poster than "What hard problems do you enjoy working on?" (and even that's a lot better than "What kind of pain are you willing to endure?"), but it might give some people a more realistic way to approach finding their life's work.
You need capital for land (and if you are going to have this capital as a tech person, go invest it and get passive returns, or start your own tech company doing service work) + labor.
Your labor is worth less, and close to third world wages.
The economic value comes from improving the land with labor and tech. Your competition is paying the same wages.
They're both on medicaid because we have decided collectively, as a society, that "ROI" is something we should chase. The mentality that it's the wrong choice because he's not trying to write a money printing piece of software is precisely why we live in the world we do. I admire someone who wants to go out and create something in the physical world. Even if, for insane reasons, America no longer seems to value that.
The classic risk-reward scenario. Tech has the potential for tremendously greater upside, but it is also insanely difficult to succeed in. Farming is comparatively quite easy. Your customer base is essentially guaranteed.
> go invest it and get passive returns
Technically farmland is an investment with passive returns. Other farmers will fall over themselves to rent it from you. If you choose to farm it yourself, you do not lose the passive return. Your farm income should reflect the rent that you would have otherwise paid if it weren't your land. Thus, in effect, you are still paying rent to yourself even if you don't formally account for it.
> Your labor is worth less
My tech job also pays me to farm. Double-dipping will always be worth more. However, even ignoring that, I make more per hour farming than I do in my tech job.
It is not very many hours, though. A hypothetical $10,000 per hour job doesn't get you far if there is only one hour of work per year to do. This is why making a living farming is hard.
Readit News
If you're thinking of doing this and do not have experience go work on a farm for a year before you buy in.
I found it difficult to get a job in tech at the start of COVID after working in it for ~25 years. I moved to Michigan, and now live in the woods. My Cost of Living is a fraction of what it was. My mortgage is only 80% of what I was paying for rent in the SFBay area. Its peaceful and quiet here. It actually gets dark too. I no longer hear BART screeching on the rails at 2am or the constant flow of traffic. I.. do once again work in tech though at a much 'smaller' scale. My company is small and work demands don't dominate my life. I have balance.
This year I've planted ~200 onions, ~100 potatoes, ~100 garlic, ~60 strawberry. I have blueberry from a few years back starting to flourish. I have wild blackberry, and mushrooms galore. "touching grass" is a daily activity as we manage our small flock of chickens.
I personally couldn’t do it… I prefer loud noises and bright lights but I lived in Rincon Hill and Times Square at various times…
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At some point the owner told us "I'm sorry guys, we'll fix this field. If I win the lottery, I'm gonna fix all of this, and I'm gonna hire a bunch of hot brazilian dancers to entertain us while we work".
It didn't even occur to him that he could stop doing it.
A: Be a billionaire and then start farming.
IE someone who is not depending on the "farm" to be a commercially successful operation or is even attempting to run it as a profitable business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_farm
I think that everyone should own some land to feed himself in the event of economy fallout.
A large garden, some chickens, and perhaps a few goats are more than enough to keep a hobbyist tinkering all day, and is still what I'd call 'farming', though YMMV.
Hmm, why?
Because they have two of every animal, but an uneconomically small herd.
In that regard Jeremy Clarkson paints a much more realistic picture, even though that show is very over the top and mostly scripted.
I grew up on a farm and was on track to take it over. I know how hard it is. And it was not the live I wanted, so I pivoted to online marketing and web development instead.
YouTube pays his bills mostly, not the farm.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD4VW0lLYjE
I went to college instead and work a regular job. Grandpa has been on that farm since he was born in 1922. Until he retired in 2006, he took two days off work the entire time.
No. Thank. You.
> Farming is hard work. Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
It depends on the scale, I know 80+ years old people living in the countryside, still splitting their own wood, growing their own garden/orchard, manually removing potatoe bugs from their decently sized potatoe field, cutting grass with a scythe, taking care of their chickens/goats/sheeps... they're 100% self sustained and use tools from the 19th century they inherited from their parents. They're in better physical and mental shape than most code monkeys I know while being 50+ years older
I do too, and not a single one of them is happy about it. Every person I talked to, starting from my grandparents, wants to move to a city where heating etc is taken care of for you, but in their age it's easier to continue doing what they've always been doing instead of enduring massive changes like that.
Of course, it's not our primary source of income, as that is my work as software engineer. For her it's a nice hobby.
I don't think you'd need a degree anyhow. Plenty of stuff can be learned online these days. And you don't need a lot of equipment either, if it's just to take care of yourself or your family. Depending on your community, you might also be able to rent some equipment if you need it at times (my girlfriend rents some equipment, tractor or some such with a driver, to cut the rice, about 2 times a year, as do most people in our village).
If you have a bit of a garden, can easily start as a hobby, I think.
Farmers can make a lot of money, or at least somebody does. A single family Saskatchewan dryland wheat farm is typically worth $10M in land and equipment so either the farmer makes enough money to pay the interest on a multi-million dollar bank loan or enough money so that continuing to farm is preferable to retiring and living on the interest.
The problem is of course the variability due to weather and wild swings in commodity prices. A farm can produce a high six figure income one year and lose six figures the next.
But as you noted, if you're not looking to pull six figures per year from your farm, then it does become quite a bit simpler.
Are we talking industrial scale? Because not every farming venture needs to reach that, and most smaller farmers don't have "college degress and millions in equipment".
And you can pick up a lot in a couple of years, I've had friends who made the switch (and extended family who worked on farming).
Not in the US though, but judging from the decent sized subculture of "living off the grid" (or close), it's probably even easier there.
At some point sitting at a computer becomes unfulfilling and some point some people can’t take it anymore.
Interesting side topic: did you know that while John Deere's top of the line combine is well over $1 million retail (and of course everyone else's models are similarly priced), that a model 42 combine from the 1960s will still go for under $1000 at auction, even as recently as last October, and is more than sufficient to harvest oh, probably even up to 50 acres over a few days? If one sells wheat or oats or whatever, there's no way to compete at market but if one only wants enough wheat to feed themselves for the coming year (and not have to buy seed again next), it's some absurdly small acreage. You might need like a fifth of an acre. There's still plenty of hard work, but mechanization solved some of the worst parts of that before we were even born.
But there are other things there's demand for, or demand can even be created for, that do not have such vast efficient scales. Hand-reared escargot, or spinach grown within resonance of a woodpecker pecking at dawn, just two examples.
Please tell me this is a real thing freaks overpay for…
Distant family member of mine started a hobby farm in retirement and lived on it for probably 30 years until his death. He lived off his pension and savings, not his crops.
Yes you can 'farm' on an industrial scale, or you can 'farm' on your parking strip. You're right when it comes to the former, and couldn't be more wrong when it comes to the latter.
> Student: I've struggled with math in the past, what do I need to do to be ready for your class?
> Me: Take the previous class first. You'll get easy A's in both, you'll actually understand the material when you need it, and there's no real downside since you have a minimum of 120 credits to fill to be able to graduate anyway.
In some ways it ties into the "big fish in a small pond" theory of life. People who take that sort of advice have easy, stable lives. I'll keep giving it. Likewise, most people probably shouldn't jump into farming unprepared.
That said, life is short, and a year is a long time. If you can stomach the downside risk (losing every dime you poured into farming, having to work hard at it), by all means just jump in. There are vibrant communities willing to teach you everything you need to know, and you'll learn faster working on real problems you're personally experiencing than rote memorizing the tasks a seasoned master tells you to do.
If you want to mitigate some of the risks, perhaps start with something small enough you could manage it without millions in equipment (high-margin products like mushrooms and arugula -- and if you go with those, focus on distribution as a primary concern).
I would love to "farm", but only as a retirement "job", and only with specific products.
https://www.goatops.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26336880 (255 points on March 4, 2021 | 80 comments )
My bias is not to go directly to factory farming or industrial agriculture, which sound depressing. I'd rather a smart and lazy approach, helping the land recover to a point and then stopping succession, as has been done with fire in the PNW mountain meadows for berry crops. I'm not under the illusion that the land-management practices of the Nisqually or Puyallup, say, didn't involve consistent work, just a different sort of work, one more within individual and small-group control.
If petroleum-fueled agriculture is "necessary", it's a mess we've gotten ourselves into.
I was a staff architect at a public company and started a trash cooperative this year
I 1000% prefer making my neighbors better off than some idiot CEO and all the assholes on the board and investors
I’ve had a few ideas in the direction of collecting certain types of trash to recycle (eg: food waste, garden waste, paper/cardboard) due to a personal interest in composting and related topics.
There’s certain stuff though that I have no idea how to recycle (yet). Would one negotiate with a larger waste management company for these items? Or simply offer it as a way for neighbours to reduce their trash collection bills?
"I love tomatoes! I'm going to grow my own!"
wow what a coincidence so do these little baby moths
Don't get me wrong, growing your own food is neat, but you're going to trade the money you'd spend on veggies for time and effort trying to keep even a small back porch of plants alive. You have to be fastidious about everything from soil maintenance/security (from pests) to pesticide application.
But if it’s for sustaining yourself, it’s not so bad.
Personally, the only “farming” I would pivot into is vertical farming. The idea of turning what would normally be a massive operation out in the country into a self sustainable, climate controlled operation in an urban environment is fascinating to me.
Optimize crops for taste rather than pest or weather resistance. Combine it with the fact that transportation can be reduced significantly; and it’s a recipe for a circular and self sustainable ecosystem.
A lot of actually viable commercial farms where I live are smaller than many hobby farms in the US, for a start.
What a lot of people mean when they say they are quitting to take up farming is pretty much hobby farming - where you may break even or turn a miniscule profit, but the main “goal” is to simply become a bit more self sufficient and do it for some sense of enjoyment.
The interesting thing is some small “hobby farms” are effectively experiments in permaculture or other forms of regenerative “living” that can be extremely cost efficient or even profitable.
The number one killer of open source projects is funding. It is demoralizing to spend years on something that isn't going to really put food on the table, and we do not live in a society that allows us to fully chase our hobbies and passions with complete abandon to that fact.
I miss the physical world and being able to touch and understand mechanical objects. In time I have become a decent bike mechanic and I can do some plumbing and electrical work.
This is just to say that some of us end up craving contact with the physical world more, not less.
I know a dev who's stopped working in his 40s (made huge money by being in the right startup at the right moment) and took up on farming, but not as a mean to survive rather than "fun".
He even ended up having quite some profit after few years by focusing on exotic edibles for gourmet restaurants, but obviously he doesn't make anywhere near the money he did as a developer, but he does love his life.
I can't lie, I aspire to do kinda the same and pick up on farming, but just for myself and family. The food industry is beyond disgusting and you just can't trust what you're eating, no matter how deep your wallet it.
For example: a “enclosed” mushroom growing op (a few sheds or cabins) can be made incredibly efficient using various sensors, automation solutions, and environmental controls to maintain the optimal growing environment. It can be as complex or as simple as you want.
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I grew up in a farming community, and whist it can be rewarding, if you are trying to make money, or be self sufficient, its fucking hard work.
Is it harder than programming? thats a subjective call. Objectively its physically harder work, mentally its way more varied. You need to be a welder, plumber, vet, horticulturist, builder, metrologist, and if you're doing properly, crooked accountant as well.
Would I take up farming? probably not. Would rather become a water mill owner? hell yeah.
I love this about farmers. They are the polymaths of our age and folks dont get it. Farming YouTube is a trip because there's more tech in a tractor than in some startups.
> and if you're doing properly, crooked accountant as well.
Yea, most people dont get what a "future" is, and why corn and lumber have them (but not onions... thats a lesson too)... The farm has the support of a lot of high finance and hedging exists not just as an instrument but has a purpose.
Ask a farmer about a grain/pork "Marketing Plan" and who they are hiring as advisors and where that person got their degree...
It's a complicated world and there are some interesting intersections out there.
That was too enticing to not look up. Wow, the story behind that is something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
Edit: There's a Planet Money with more on this story (which I've not listened to): https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/10/14/448718171/epis...
Not many farmers I know (in an ag community) understand what a future is either, or would even know how to trade them. That's the domain of hedge funds, not farmers. (And, if they tried, they'd probably lose. It's not much different from me trying out day trading.)
The fruit of a farmer's work is not futures trading. It's trying to keep things alive long enough to make a small profit.
Not sure how commmon this is anymore. The age of the family farm with a mix of livestock, rotating crops, and woodlands are long gone in the developed world. Each of these tasks would be handled mostly by a professional in any serious farming operation.
[1] https://www.nifa.usda.gov/about-nifa/blogs/study-reveals-agr...
Letting it get too complicated risks losing all of the small-scale farms because then only large companies will have the scale and aggregate skill and money to farm. Tight margins means they might decide to quit and go do something else given the amount of skill and work required for so little profit.
Being a farmer and not owning the land that you work is soul crushing.
The farmers I know in my family all struggled mightily because every year was about accumulating a little more capital so they could rent some more land or buy the next piece of equipment they needed to grow in a few years.
The people who do it as a semi-retirement after a different career often come in with funds to buy land (as an investment) and have some working capital up front. When the goal is more about getting any positive number out of the farm to offset property taxes and you’re not running it like a business where squeezing every penny out of rented land with rented equipment is the only way to make it to next year, it’s a very different experience.
Hopefully this person is lucky enough to be in the latter group and have this be more hobby than bootstrapping a farming enterprise.
Don't know if it was intentional, but this maligns some of the hardest-working and down-to-earth people that I've ever known as crooked.
But perhaps this is just referring to taxes, but farmers are also not incented to fudge too much on their taxes: they receive subsidies, and very little is paid with cash anymore, so is easily tracked.
Sadly, most farms today are huge corporate operations, so perhaps that's what you're talking about, but out of the less than 25% of the remaining family-sized operations, most are not wealthy by any stretch. Perhaps that's what they're doing "wrong".
I think one of the reasons you can't really be crooked as a farmer is because it's a small community and everyone knows everyone else. If you rip someone else off, everyone will know. It's much easier to be crooked in a bigger city where there's another sucker born every day.
you misread me.
I don't mean, they rip off other farmers, I mean subsidy farming.
In the UK there were such things as flying herds, that were bussed in when inspections were due. Do they get rich from it? fuck no, does it allow them to survive, it did, until the UK government threw them under a bus.
I don't know enough of the context of these repos, their significance or ongoing use, but it feels weird to return just to archive en masse. I think it might actually be the least worst option - leaving it open as if you might return gives a false sense of the project, and passing to a successor is a lot of work.
We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.
IMO that's exactly it, the guy wanted to give a strong signal and not string people along. That I respect a lot.
> We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.
I don't know who is "we" in your sentence but "we the working programmers" are busy as hell and most of us are not as privileged to basically wonder what do we do with our time. Whoever has the time and energy and if they can muster the motivation, please help -- the OSS world desperately needs much more people, and has always needed them. The rest of us who have to prioritize well-being and family are excused for wanting to spend a few leisure hours a day.
Nah. Even after reading the Roads and Bridges Report, I disagree with this.
People are naive and too nice, and that's the problem that needs fixing, not reality.
The reality is that you shouldn't do open source work unless you just want to help Microsoft's AI.
Just kidding.
The reality is that you should do open source work without expecting compensation, and anyone that wants you to "maintain" things should be told that's not how it works. How it works is they should fork it and maintain it themselves. Tough, right? Well, it's free code. That's the price THEY pay for it. Making the person who gave it to you for free pay for it is asinine.
It's also asinine to imagine a world where humanity works differently. Roads and Bridges recommended some kind of invasive tracking to be able to figure out how much money an open source project is hypothetically worth to be able to report that to corporations to beg for money to monetize open source more easily (and, of course, help "diversify" it by seeing how many unicorns are doing development and keep that in a PR spreadsheet somewhere), but you can sense that all of this is false dharma. You're doing it wrong. It needs no help or money or diversity; look at all it's given us without any of that. It just needs to be used correctly.
The free software movement started by programmers, for programmers. The expectation is that the user can read the code, fork the thing, and do what they want with it. But in our eagerness to have our cake and eat it too, we imagine non-technical users have some right to demand that the developer fix the code they offered us or change it to implement some feature. And, misconditioned as they are, the devs play along and feel the onus is on them to appease that rabble, and then they get burned out.
Also, the tagline of that distro is "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."[1] - I call foreshadowing.
[1]: https://kisslinux.github.io
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden
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These ideas challenged my ideas of “turning it off and on again” and overall system design. I needed to prove to myself that I was more than a brain, and I was more than the “kid that was good with computers.” What was my body for?
I quit my virtualization/sysadmin job and moved to a farm in central Wisconsin, helping a small family with 4 acres of veggies for market, milked 20 goats and 2 cows, turkey, sheep … the whole works.
Farming didn’t work out long term for me but it taught excellent lessons and gave me a better foundation for understanding my satisfaction of being human, e.g. is the grass greener on the other side of the fence?
Was it?
The grass is greener where you water it.
Programming for fun is great too. Hit a problem that's not something you enjoy? Drop the project and move on.
The "its fun" vs "I don't tolerate these hard problems that come with the skill" is a significant disconnect that people have and one of the things that generates a lot of people starting something (be it a project or a career) and not moving up on it.
http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018...
> ... Then I went off to college to study architecture... and found that, while I liked many things about the field, I didn't really like to do the grunt work that is part of the architecture student's life, and when the assigned projects got more challenging, I didn't really enjoy working on them.
> But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles.
> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.
> I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more compelling motivational poster than "What hard problems do you enjoy working on?" (and even that's a lot better than "What kind of pain are you willing to endure?"), but it might give some people a more realistic way to approach finding their life's work.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41vETgarh_8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI78WOW_u-Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za45bT41sXg
Also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Size_Me_2:_Holy_Chicken
You need capital for land (and if you are going to have this capital as a tech person, go invest it and get passive returns, or start your own tech company doing service work) + labor.
Your labor is worth less, and close to third world wages.
The economic value comes from improving the land with labor and tech. Your competition is paying the same wages.
I know 2 people doing this, both are on medicaid.
The classic risk-reward scenario. Tech has the potential for tremendously greater upside, but it is also insanely difficult to succeed in. Farming is comparatively quite easy. Your customer base is essentially guaranteed.
> go invest it and get passive returns
Technically farmland is an investment with passive returns. Other farmers will fall over themselves to rent it from you. If you choose to farm it yourself, you do not lose the passive return. Your farm income should reflect the rent that you would have otherwise paid if it weren't your land. Thus, in effect, you are still paying rent to yourself even if you don't formally account for it.
> Your labor is worth less
My tech job also pays me to farm. Double-dipping will always be worth more. However, even ignoring that, I make more per hour farming than I do in my tech job.
It is not very many hours, though. A hypothetical $10,000 per hour job doesn't get you far if there is only one hour of work per year to do. This is why making a living farming is hard.