> In the 1800s, 90 percent of the US population lived on a farm, rocking their WFH setups. How did they all survive without mental breakdowns and Harvard Business Review articles praising strict Work-Life Balance?<p>They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them.
This article is ridiculous. I’m a farmer and clearly I have time to surf the internet, and separating work from life is absolutely something I do - and my fathers before me. Grandma would’ve never put up with shop talk at the dinner table.
What possible value is there in holding a farmer's lifestyle as a model or contrast for knowledge workers? Are work/life balance concerns not a problem because someone somewhere collects eggs at 5am and vegetables at 8pm?<p>Further, suicides and other mental health issues are endemic among farmers. And I'm pretty sure work-life balance is an endless concern for those so engaged.
Historically speaking farming has been a very up and down business and not a good way to make a living.<p>In the US we have this idea that there was a golden age of farming, but the cycles of boom and bust and etc have been all over the map, often short and unpredictable. Even the historical homestead type plots were potentially unsustainable at the time they were given away.<p>Not everyone is cut out to run their own business and farming is a pretty tough one at that ...
Working for yourself, at your own pace, and doing things you chose to do and can choose to no longer do (like growing rye or having chickens as the article names) are a lot less stressful than working for someone else, with their deadlines, doing things they chose to do, like growing rye or having chickens.<p>If you do it yourself you can set yourself boundaries. If some other schmuck does it you can get yourself a bigger rye field and just tell him it has to be all done by the end of the day, or whatever else you can make them do for 8+ hours a day.<p>I mean I wouldn't idealize farming per se, if it's your livelihood and you can't compete with the industrial farming complex, but I can see how it can be a lot less stressful if you're your own boss and are financially secure.
As a farmer, always working from home, I realise I am exceptionally privileged not to be trapped in a tiny apartment during multi-month covid lockdowns. It must be hard to keep any balance when you are eating, sleeping, working and resting in the same box
Unbelievable. It’s only five in the morning and I’m right where I work. And while the other poor sods struggle in on the tube, I’m going to get some milk out of a cow!<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE</a>
I'm not sure of the point of this comparison. My grandparents had a dairy farm that they lived on their entire lives. It is a 6-7 day/week job and the days are long. If you want to take a day off you have to pay someone to come do the work.<p>It also has nothing to do with WFH. My grandpa might start the day in the barn, drive a tractor to a field a few miles away to cut hay for a few hours, come back for lunch, fix a fence, feed some calves, run the silo, then milk the cows for a second time. It's not like he was ever sitting on his ass staring at a screen. There is a hard fulfillment that comes with that life. And it's definitely not WFH.
Farmers never work from home.<p>Has he ever been at a farm? The farmer does not live where the cattle live, and the animal feed is not stored where he lives. Farmers are in the barn or working in the field most of the time. When they are at home, they eat or sleep, or occasionally watch TV, although after an 18-hour day one is usually too tired to do so.<p>And there are even many more farmers who do not have their own land, and often have to travel far to get to the rented farm or field. And there are even more farm workers who travel far and wide by the thousands during the harvest to do their work.<p>Many people have an unrealistic idea of rural life.
The entire premise of the article is untrue. Larger farms always had paid or unpaid laborers who where not "the Farmer" but still farmers. With the industrialisation this tendency increased as mom&pop farms got fewer and average farm size increased. In the whole eastern block, private small farms were absent or an exception, the rule was the kolkhoz model, e.g. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landwirtschaftliche_Produktionsgenossenschaft" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landwirtschaftliche_Produktion...</a>
Farmers were employees with regular work time, fields of employment like operating machinery, milking or tending lifestock. The author ignores all this and draws conclusions from a mostly-wrong stereotype.
Hailing from Poland (like the author) I see this write-up as a yet another manifestation of the toxic culture of overwork prevalent in this country.<p>I lived like that during the first years of working remotely and it's both inefficient and unhealthy.
Supply and demand. We're not running out of dirt and not running out of water (east of the mississippi) or running out of farm labor. So if your farmer neighbor works 7x10 and you work 6x8 you are going out of business.<p>Side job makes it better for individuals and worse for the community. My great uncle gentleman-farmed 40 or so acres of sweet corn and had a roadside stand on the major road he lived on. But the gas stations he owned paid the real bills. Meanwhile his neighbor corn farmers had to compete (on a small scale) with a guy who doesn't need to make money and thinks restoring tractors is a hobby (so he needs something for the tractors to do after he fixes them up, next thing you know he has 40 acres of corn planted...) Luckily his competitor neighbors had a lot more than 40 acres or he'd have put them out of business.<p>Any low barrier of entry, high supply low demand job is going to be very rough on the employees. Imagine being a supermarket cashier, which is bad enough, but also having to put up money to buy and stock the store before even being allowed to labor there. Meanwhile the guy down the street is doing it as a hobby off second mortgages or other employment to pay the bills. So that's farming.<p>The cost of food is high because of innumerable layers of middlemen, also lots of "value added" processing. Corn runs around 10 cents per liter (weird measurement system but whatever). Corn flakes cost a supermarket consumer a couple bucks per liter. The farmers get pennies on the dollar at most. That's why they're motivated to "do all that work for free" when selling direct to customers in CSAs or farmers markets. It must be heartbreaking to see three corn ears saran-wrapped at a food store for $1.50 and know as a farmer you only got a penny from that to pay all your bills, which probably near approach the penny earned. So selling ears at the "hipster farmers market" is a good deal at a quarter per ear. On the other hand if you "invested" four hours loading the trucks and driving and 8 hours sitting there, its easy to go broke on an amazing profit margin if it rains on the farm market that day so people stay home.<p>Anyway, aside from heartbreaking stories about family farms, we simply have too many farmers, so they're working for miserable pay under miserable conditions, mostly. Biggest scam ever by corporate PR is pushing the loss of the family farm story to keep the WAY too many middlemen story out of the news.
The statement is not true in general. The typical layout of a European village is having the houses close to the centre and the arable land surrounding the village. You wouldn't have your arable land directly outside of your porch (you wouldn't even have a porch).
And that was probably the setup centuries ago when feudalism was still practiced. Through inheritance, the last pre-industrial farmers were tending to parcels of land all over the place, although probably still within a reasonable commute of their village.
But definitely not "working from home".
I think the problem is, the work (on computers) is never done. It takes months for me to say, "well, I got that wheat harvested" (in computer terms). There's always some more bullshit, so you can't just step away; more is always waiting, and you're always blocking someone somehow.<p>The way we make money digitally does not map to a practical, dynamic life. We need to re-structure what "work" is, what it is we are trying to accomplish, and how.
Farmers have incredibly high incidence of mental health issues compared to the general population. Farmers are under incredible stress. Farmers are more likely to say life is not worth living than the general population. Maybe they are not a good example.
<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6926562/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6926562/</a>
I find this a weird take. Farmers were "working from home" long before the concepts of "workplace", "working time" and "spare time" were invented - those are (to my knowledge) products of the industrial revolution and its estranged, highly structured factory work.<p>You might as well ask how the medieval world managed to maintain such a stellar CO2 balance.
A big difference between farming and WFH discourse is that if you own the farm, your labor is all to your benefit and controlled by you (even if circumstances can demand a lot). Office work is dictated by bosses that control you. Your labor and reward are alienated from you. Strict separation is a good idea because that shit is toxic.
Farming is <i>hard work</i>. Commercial farmers in my area pull 18+ hour days during harvest time. I don't think articles about farming quite capture just how labor-intensive farming is, how little sleep you get, and the overly hot/wet/dry conditions you have to work through during harvest.
You could watch somebody work 16 hours, and totally like the idea, but you yourself of course would be too broken and debilitated by your internet access to do the same.<p>But if you did, you'd be happy, you just know it. A simpler life, fruits of your labor and such.
This whole article reads like someone out of touch. We went to the countryside to observe the pastoral lifestyle! Hey look at these farmers! They're "working from home" all the time! Wow look at them milking cows!<p>Farming is a hell of a lot of work and they have a poor "work life balance" out of necessity. There's too much to do. Maybe they find it rewarding, but I don't think it's an ideal everyone should be striving for.<p>Also, try gardening, it's fun to grow your own produce.
And farmers also had pretty crappy lives too. If I gotta be in an office 8 hours a day so I can eat deep fried Chinese food, have a car, and live in a nice apartment, so be it. Better than eating half assed food on a farm on top of meagre wages.