I'll definitely echo this. I grew up on a farm / nature refuge in Australia. It's beautiful to go back to, but I could not live there again. My family hovers around the poverty line, work long, hard hours, and are completely at the mercy of the climate and other difficult to control external factors for their lively hood.
Combine this with the isolation, poor (or non-existent) community and education resources, complete void of cultural events and niche activities that require higher population densities. It's nowhere near as idyllic as most people make out.
I now live inner city. When it's nice weather I can drive an hour, go hiking, rock climbing or exploring. During day-to-day life I have everything I need within walking distance. I can live spontaneously. Myself and my partner are talking about children and I'm looking forward to raising them in a city where they can access whatever interests they like.
Once thing I will agree on though is: modern suburban life is a dystopic hellscape. It literally combines the worst of both lifestyles.
As an example: I'm living in what's definitely the suburbs (VA Beach), but within easy walking distance of the local coffee shop, groceries, my kids school, etc.
We don't have an HOA, but know a lot of our neighbors. I have a car, but don't use it much b/c of both location and that I work from home.
I like FPS games to. ;-)
If you're good at it you can make decent money but someone who's only worked desk jobs is not going to be good, at least not for a while.
Hell, I don't even have any pets because I travel frequently enough that they'd be a hassle. I can't imagine how I'd deal with an entire farm in these circumstances. I barely keep one houseplant alive as it is, not from lack of care when I'm home, but from lack of care when I'm gone.
In the case of e.g. cereal crops in the north, there are 4-6 months where you can do little beyond some maintenance, buying/selling equipment, planning next year's crop, etc. that means there is plenty of time for vacations. You are right that during seeding or harvest (especially), all bets for travel are off.
But, it is incorrect to imply that because you farm, you ought to kiss vacations good-bye.
Chickens are likely easiest, but on a scale to produce a living for a family, I don't think any type of farming or ranching is low effort or easy to step away from.
That seems to be what the article is about. The first case study is a vegetable farm, without any hint that they produce anything else. They are also industrial-scale, else they would be considered gardeners, not farmers.
Farming must be the last industry in the western world that has children working in it and it's seen as OK.
Kids in isolated tribes or areas are running away from their parents lifestyle as fast as possible. They don't see the beauty in the old ways and are unable to see the lies in modern cities, too much shiny.
Surely nothing is perfect but modern society has reached a point of diminishing returns IMO. Somatic and mental health issues, absurd jobs, absurd structures influenced by remote financial games; etc etc
Whenever I see some guy that bought a piece of land and fixed an old barn I get dreams. All I'd need a bit more mileage in ceramics and electronics so I can get just enough modern science, the rest is already there.
If an area can't bring in the tax dollars and other money to run the local economy, it degrades. When the only influx of anything is welfare dollars, how is that a beautiful way? It wasn't beautiful sixty years ago either. Stories of my parent's generation are similar stories of poverty and struggle and the occasional running away to live an almost comfortable life closer to the city. The "work ethic" often lauded by those who pine for these times seems to be the willingness to work far too much for far too little.
You’re assuming that the bulk of the market always has to be cheap commodity goods. But the idea behind the artisanal movement is that both sides of the market will change. More small producers will produce more high quality goods and more consumers will pay high prices to buy them. Both sides need to grow in synchrony.
Maybe you can argue the dominance of low quality commodity foods is inevitable. I’d love to see that argument.
Doesn’t change the fact that Apple is the most profitable firm.
I don't hold it against science and bio-tech for bringing high yield and disease resistant crops to market; that shit will help us feed the whole planet economically. Doesn't mean I can't also enjoy organic, non-altered food in my own home. I get annoyed with this attitude so many people have about these things, that somehow we can either feed the whole planet economically or have ritzy well-to-do people buy organic kale. We can do both very easily.
I suspect it's a "the grass is always greener in the neighbour's lawn... or in this case pasture" effect.
Intermittent sun exposure has also been blamed rather than frequent to promote tanning.
Lack of exercise and stress from indoor jobs may play a part as well in increased cancer risk in general.
On a lighter note, check out this Canadian using a large backyard as a profitable farm: https://youtu.be/KO-OuqbR3EE
Here’s also a working Swedish homestead/farm (that’s being threated by the uncertainty of oil/mineral extraction): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7GkLSNBmds1DZit_oHk-Fg
I suspect these individuals will find something new to popularise and produce at high margin.
Well, no. They have no idea what it involves for that type of scale, but to say they have no idea at all (about their operating scale) seems to just show your hurt feelings about growing up that way.
debt can be viewed as another word for "relationship."
and it's cool in some ways, yet in other ways kind of a shame: debt from the United States is, to some degree, buying into the military-industrial complex. valuing China's money is, in part, condescending to a rather selective perspective on human rights. hopefully the guanxi flows to the best in each rather than the worst.
i don't pretend to understand the international economy. however, with the sort of logistics enabled by modern communications technology, i suspect that it's a lot more feasible to completely pack one large barge with a variety of goods than it used to be, making for lower-cost shipping than one might expect.
Most of the hipster microgreen crowd aren't even making their money that way, they are making it by scamming other hipsters into trying to do that by acting like anyone can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling $10/pound lettuce to hipster restaurants. There's obviously a very limited number of restaurants in the "overcharge people for local food" market to sell to. But you don't need to do that crap. You can sell normal vegetables for a normal price to normal people and make a perfectly reasonable living.
>Once enough people do this, the prices fall and you're just another farmer, scraping by.
The reason most farms are "scraping by" is the same reason most restaurants fail, and most programmers can't handle fizzbuzz. Most people are simply incompetent, regardless of their occupation. Every farmer I see complaining about money is wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of them are driving around in $80,000 pickup trucks while complaining about how poor they are.
>Being outside is nice, but there's a reason the kids doing this grew up in suburbs and cities: they have no idea what agriculture really involves when you have to achieve economies of scale to make it remotely profitable.
You don't have to achieve economies of scale to be remotely profitable. Not every farm has to be a corn+soybean rotation.
Can you elaborate on this? What exactly is the scam? How does the scam work?
I grew up working on farms. It's not romantic to me in any way. Being outside is nice, but there's a reason the kids doing this grew up in suburbs and cities: they have no idea what agriculture really involves when you have to achieve economies of scale to make it remotely profitable.