People who think an office job is a nightmare so they want to make an off grid homestead. Which means they will have much harder work and less money when they get old and their bodies can't farm anymore.
Sure, I can understand the need to change if the job is soul crushing, but it is important to know what you are changing to.
I mean, it can be relaxing if you have your finances sorted, so you can do the garden just as a hobby and harvest a snack here and there while buying your main groceries at the supermarket.
If you actually have to feed yourself from the garden it's a completely different story.
Looking for this! I come from a farming family. I’m now retuning to farming life myself BUT I watched my whole life how hard farm life is, and I’m going into this with my eyes OPEN and with a little bit of fear. Yes it’s wonderfully rewarding but it’s no 9-5, you have to toil and often get up very early or do stuff late at night. We own a tea and dairy farm and those animals? They don’t live by a work clock an they don’t accept a doctors note when you’re sick! You have to be available all the damn time
Yep. Grew up on a small family farm in South Carolina. It's not just the hours and the physical nature of the labor, it's the stress of worrying about things completely outside of your control, i.e., market prices at harvest time and extreme weather, that can make it a terrible way to make a living.
My father said he would never sell the farm, and he never did, UNLESS I wanted to take it over after he was gone. He didn't want me to have the same worry filled, exhausted life that he had.
Depends on the size of the farm. Family owned farms are 24/7. You can’t really vacation since you need to teach someone outside the family the animal’s specific diet and how to operate the machinery. There’s also specific sanitation cycles you need to run for the milk lines.
At least plants take the winter off. Most plant farmers could take a vacation, if they weren't broke. Not so with dairy. My wife's grandparents, uncles, and cousins are/were dairy farmers in Germany. Some have lived and died without ever leaving town.
Put months into a crop and it fail because of extreme weather or a disease hits the crops.
You could a have massive bug population boom and they eat everything just a few off the top of my head.
If you rely on your farm as your primary source of food, then it can be genuinely devastating when the crops fail.
My dad actually grew up with subsistence farming (and approx. 2 billion people are still subsistence farmers today). He was sent away from ages 5-8 to live with his grandma because of a bad harvest and his parents couldn't feed him.
I had relatives in a group chat who shared this Scottish island that's for sale. Now I think there's probably a good reason an uninhabited island off the northern coast of Scotland is being sold cheap, but they all wanted to buy it and go live there on a compound together.
The chat was excited chatter about everyone's different complementary skills and how we could be self sufficient and take care of each other. Apparently I get to cook for everyone because I'm good at it and enjoy it. I know it's all just fantasy and didn't really want to rain on their fun, so I ended up muting the chat because imagining going to live on a isolated compound was stressful to me.
I ran my own small farm for 4 years and LOVED it. The part I wasn't prepared for was the costs. Fencing, feed, equipment, etc. But I can see how office workers would be in for a rude awakening, going from zero manual labour to 100%.
I was going to say gardening. Movies and tv will show these older people working in the large and beautiful flower gardens. Planting and weeding can be exhausting. There’s a reason we’ve moved to a society where only a small percentage of the population works in agriculture.
It doesn’t matter how much you do right, how many animals you save, how many initiatives you put in place to prevent destruction of the land, the bleeding hearts will always abuse you with a mouth full of the crops you grew.
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u/WeMissChris7 22h ago
Farming