But pretty awesome this individual is retiring from programming / taking a sabbatical. There is nothing wrong with taking some time off and pursuing other interests when you lose your passion.
Then I let loose for a week, touch grass, allow my mind to wander/wonder and - boom - a new coding project consumes me and I rekindle that initial passion I had once again.
Rinse and repeat, for the rest of my life, and I don't see issue with that.
What a capricious market!
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dennis+mille...
(Dylan is an Australian - they only have a moderately slightly better attitude about vacation than the USA, alas. 4 weeks instead of 2-3, on average. /laughs in Austrian ..)
Unthinkable in the Silicon Valley hustle culture, but true.
Not everyone thinks “touch grass” is the answer. I want to live in the second subbasement 24/7, or in space.
These are not terribly expensive, although installation can be tricky if you're not handy. The humidifier, for me, is a godsend in the winter months. I had a cabinet style one before and I'd have to refill the water tanks daily, which was a pain. It put ~5 gallons of water into the air each day.
Good luck to them.
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…
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.
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.
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://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.
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 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.
Also, the tagline of that distro is "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."[1] - I call foreshadowing.
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?
If first few were in the late 80s, back then it the trend where I lived was Pizza Shops in areas that were growing fast. The ones I knew that jumped were happy they did.
edit: fixed typo to happy
Really made you think about those brilliant minds out there and how they work.
It can help you market yourself (if you have that disposition) for jobs/gigs. But will you keep up interest?
You can try (and probably not succeed) at starting a company around open source. Then all the baggage that comes with maybe needing to switch to a non-open license to monetize it.
You can really put effort to building a large maintainer base / community and get it into a foundation (ie Apache, PSF, etc).
You can ignore it, but if its successful, be nagged and harassed incessantly to merge PRs
Generally these paths are all hard / different... and it seems the stress of dealing with the passive consumers is either a massive headache, or something you need to try to monetize. I wish we as an industry did a better job supporting creators here.
It would take a better person than me to make a living at it.
Many moons ago, I also romanticized the idea of doing something completely unrelated to computers, and started my own bakery. We hired a chef and someone to manage the operations. Started exclusively for deliveries, and we shortly opened it to dine-in orders too.
My contribution was mostly money, ideas, some logistics, and... marketing. I still had a knack for programming, so I spent hours setting up order delivery software (we deliver cakes to parties, etc), automatic Uber Eats orders to KOTs, and of course social media, Facebook ads, etc. Apart from social media and ads, the rest felt fun.
It was tedious work and we simply had competitors that had years of experience, good connections, and great suppliers. We were nearly breaking even, and I think I was more stressed than I was ever at programming related work.
My two cents if that if you feel like being a carpenter or farmer or to live in a small village running a cozy homestay, they all come with significant challenges. Starting from zero isn't that easy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs&t=2m35s
Not a bad idea, actually.
I did something like this, it was life changing. For the first time ever, I wasnt counting the days until retirement or a long 7+ day vacation.
(Edit for clarity: I ended up taking a job. Talented coworkers were more interesting than my hobbies + I contributed to the world which was cool. Made it so I didn't really want to retire, I actually enjoyed work.)
That sounds rather positive. Still 'it was not the dream'?
As time progresses, I get more and more envious of them both.
>ln -s /usr/bin/fastfetch /home/$USER/.local/bin/neofetch
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
In farming, something is always broken or less than it should be. But there is literally not enough time in the day (or money) to fix and maintain everything perfectly. So you do the best you can.
Similarly, in waterwork, the ocean beats the hell out of everything. Docks, boats, houses, machinery, etc. And so why fix that solid but beat-up dock, if there's a chance this year brings the hurricane that rips it away? Functionality is more important than form.
You could end up:
- living off the land
- paying low taxes on your homestead
(house + 1 acre)
- paying almost no taxes on your ag
land (all but 1 acre)
- stretching your savings for many
more years than you'd have any
right to otherwiseMichigan summers are much much milder (and shorter) than Texas summers (I lived in Houston for a few years).
Michigan is also cool in the winter
With very few exceptions, hating your customers is not good for your business.
Send me a message at Andrew@seegull.org if you want
I just wish these things were more common place. All these technological advances...it should be easy option for people to live in communities where they can do few hours of work a day and live simply. Yet this is somehow a complete luxury!
Instead we need cars, roads, computers, phones, to work 8-10 hours a day just to provide ourselves with shelter food and clothing.
Then again... this was the 1950s and paper contracts, so US market intervention or not was more stark.
And also Eisenhower was likely more concerned about whether the USSR was going to nuke the US and if China was going to try to invade Taiwan for a third time.
especially as all that work in the first year meant he made something like £900
Barn Talk is... something. IF you're liberal it might offend you at some points, but there is a ton of gold in there. They also have a channel about their day to day farming.
Welker Farms, Millennial Farmer, Cole the Corn Star and Larson farms are all "interesting"... They are all very different.
He also has a lot of really practical videos on the business of small farming. He’s very adamant about not going into debt before you start, doing market research in your area, and starting very small but rolling over the proceeds from your first sales back into the farm.
Some cattle for dairy, meat and market. Some crops. And often some woodland for tax or grant reasons or under forestry contracts. Maybe some chickens or pigs or similar - usually for local markets.
It’s actually quite neat: I can easily obtain actually free range eggs at relatively low cost, produced within a few kilometers of where I live (a city). Same for pork products, etc.
All of that requires big machinery, and that breaks or is expensive. So it needs fixing. specialist fixers are there for expensive things, like combine harvesters. but for unfucking a plough or much spreader, thats a you problem.
Plenty of farmers (who are super savvy) have embraced social media, and are showing not telling what they do.
It's the same in Poland, in this period of the year the sunset is at 10 pm and dusk at 11.
I'm with ya, I tend to rise with the sun and 5:00 AM gets very old. Morning's like "Can I just sneak by you? Ope[0], sorry 'bout that, didn't mean to wake you up"
[0] I couldn't resist.
If you think about how most of Europe is at the same latitude as Canada, you really start to appreciate how important the Gulf Stream is for our climate...
Except whenever they came to Portland to play the Trailblazers, the arena commentators would mock it with signs like "We The North-er" etc. Portland is just over 2 degrees further north than Toronto.
How old are you?
You don’t have to answer, but I’m guessing you’re probably not past 45.
At some point, you start to prefer quiet.
I haven’t lived in a really large city, but have been around noise enough that I’m hoping our next move will distance us from neighbors and highway noise.
And yes, maybe we’ll have a farm animal or two.
It doesn't matter if the parent's assumptions are "quite a few" or don't match you, what matters is if they match a big segment of the population to be statistically useful. There are always outliers who love to grow old in a big city and have their ashes scaterred in the middle of Manhattan.
> I haven’t lived in a really large city, but have been around noise enough that I’m hoping our next move will distance us from neighbors and highway noise.
I feel this, and I'm mid 40s. I keep my eyes open for places to live which are somehow both remote and near decent healthcare options. I don't need the healthcare options now, but I am aware that I am only going to get older and that's something that I'd want.
I do my best to keep my yard full of life and tend to my plants and my gardens, but there's always the noise from the highway a mile or so away. It's less annoying when it's hot out, but the drone bothers me in the winter months.
Generalizing, I'd say younger people (18-35) are more default-comfortable in novel situations. As we age, people's tolerance for that seems to decrease.
And, on the whole, I'd say that rural life provides less novelty than city life. Or at least novelty within tighter bounds.
Some people do find a more rural life unappealing.
Maybe... maybe some things are worth doing not simply because there's a dollar sign in the result. Let's ponder that this Juneteenth.
- declining reliability of seeds
- increasing variation in climate
- Ron DeSantis, according to Donald Trump
On one side is see land cultivators and on the other hand i see animal exploiters. The first do -IHMO- a great job akin to school teacher, the latter do a horrible job akin to a concentration camp commander.
Having one word to describe both is beyond me.
That said, I do find it amazing how these two groups stick together and back each other up in politics!
But since I'm talking to a vegan interlocutor, the response will be "murderer, psychopath, exploiter, rapist, torturer", et cetera. The out-group is wrong and evil, by definition.
So there was a past in which the lines were more blurry and animals were not as hardcore exploited as they are today. I agree. And there was a time in which people in many places needed animal husbandry to survive (nomads, cold climates, etc. -- everywhere away from the habitat of the other primates). I agree.
But what I do not agree on is that these two points make the word "farmer" less "cover two topics at once" in this day and age, were:
1) animals are most commonly being exploited at a massive scale when being "farmed", and
2) we can live really well without animal derived foods/clothes/labour
Want a house? Get ready to replace: The foundation, the roof, the sewer lateral, oh and the addition wasn't done with a permit so its not to code at all. All for the low low price of $500k! On a lovely 1/4th acre plot, you'll be hearing your neighbor while they fart in the bathroom. What, you only got $500k? Don't worry, this other person here has $550k and they don't have a problem with the house need to be rebuilt!
Oh I'm looking at $500k houses? I should be looking at 1.1mil houses to not deal with all those problems? Now I've got 1.1mil mortgage for 30 years. I don't want to work into my 70's for a house.
Compared to... come to Michigan, you can get 5 acres for less than $300k and your house is functional, maybe it needs a new roof within 5 years. My mortgage is 15 years and will be paid off before that.
I think "competition" is the big thing that drove me back home. I was tired of competing with my neighbors (people who live in the same city) for _everything_. I don't mind people, I loved meeting people in every city I lived. I just felt like I had to fight for every "inch" in most "big cities" (but especially SFBay area).
It's very peaceful here. I love it. Maybe I'll go to the big lake (Michigan) later and swim.
Once it gets big enough that "good" restaurants require a reservation any day of the week, and those reservations are difficult to get, I'm moving somewhere else.
Why work to fight to win... what you can just enjoy somewhere else?
You mentioned the 300,000 on 5 acres, and that's definitely possible, but you're not getting that in the desirable parts of Macomb or Oakland County[0], nor anywhere in Wayne outside of Detroit/Detroit-ish areas.
I watched a house on a busy city road (one where "pulling out of the driveway means an immediate traffic backup to the light" between 7-9 and 4-6 every day) which was 2,200 sq ft, 4 BR 2.0 BA, though it was new construction (relatively modern/upgraded interior) go for $550,000 in 2022 after multiple bids. The home I own (1800/3BR/1.5BA) which I purchased for $175,000 in 2001 and would have lost money had I sold it between 2007~2018, is worth about $330,000. This is partly due to the value increasing due to local changes and "what's happening everywhere in the country" housing prices-wise. I know folks who moved to Plymouth to a home with similar specs but paid a quarter million in 2017.
Cool. And because I didn't re-finance, I don't have a mortgage any longer. Except I want to upgrade. And had I done that in 2008, I could have afforded it. Now that upgrade is twice as much but my salary has not followed suit. My desire to upgrade went to near zero, already, once I paid it off. But now I couldn't even afford to if I wanted to. I figure I'll downgrade and move near the kids when they're older and take home some cash in the process.
One thing I love about where I live in Michigan, though ... it's rare that a house doesn't have a basement. Even in places you wouldn't expect -- our next-door neighbor on Lake Huron had a full basement with 12ft ceilings (and a hell of a system to keep it bone dry). And newer homes tend to have excellent ones you can make useful -- if not always up-to-code -- living/lab spaces out of. SFBay hacks in their garage. We hack in our basements.
[0] When people say they "Live in Detroit" that's probably where they live. Just like the Detroit Zoo.
Best I've been able to do is work for employers out of state/country but I'm currently employed locally at a remote-only shop.
The weather. I get it. Everyone uses the same "5 minutes and it'll change" joke, but we're unique here. I thought I read somewhere that we see fewer cloudless days than the Pacific Northwest, but I can't find a reference so I suspect that's false, but we spend, basically, December to April with few sunny days. We live in a place of extremes, as well. Ten below (Fahrenheit) in the coldest winter days, 99 degrees a couple of days ago. Had one day in July when I was in High School where it was 85 degrees in the morning and in about a 15-minute period of time dropped to 45 due to a Derecho[0] rolling through (which almost picked me up off the ground due to 75 MPH winds and sent a large Oak Tree through our master bedroom).
We don't get Spring or Autumn, we get Winter, Summer, and a period of time where the two are at war and it may be Winter or Summer depending on what day/hour it is. A decade ago, I was in the ER on the first week of March. The hospital couldn't "turn on the Air Conditioning" at will, they had to switch over seasonally, so when we had an unexpected 85 degree day, that meant it was about 85 degrees in the ER. That was fun.
It is a beautiful place if you get out of the more populated parts, but I work here and that's where I live. Still, nice that it's an hour drive to get to something that qualifies as "Up North[1]"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho
[1] A phrase that has little to do with direction around here ... mostly just means "resort-ish small town, a lot of which survives due to summer 'Cabin Up North' folks." Ours is in Port Sanilac. But, really, Lake Orion and Walled Lake used to be "Up North" communities :)
On the other hand, livestock farming is incredibly hard work (cows need to be milked 365 days a year) and you more or less always lose money.
Pests, bad weather etc. are definitely issues even with modern farming techniques, so in a good year you make a bit of money but in a bad year you can lose most of the crop
I think the temptation of America's artisanal manufacturing and farming is to revive a strong relationship between hard work and value. Maybe you remember beginning in software to help people, but look back at too many sacrifices inflicted on nature and humanity just to game the extractive component of ROI. So, I agree with your philosophy, but I want to say that farmers themselves obsess about ROI. I'm sure you understand their long-term success relies on interfacing with competitive markets right up to physical delivery. I wouldn't call that an American mentality because it affects farmers around the world.
Payment date can be decoupled from delivery date... So it can be a "loan" as well.
As a producer you're betting on yield. If you expected 140 bushels an acre and got 130 your on the hook for the rest. Regardless of price on thee market ... even if its 10x what you were paid. SO your negotiating VOLUME on a product you haven't made yet, and could have a shortfall of.
There is a whole set of quality issues with the product as well... Too wet, to dry, wrong type, misses the mark on grading...
You can sell options on futures... some smaller amount of money today and agree to sell at a price at a later date, maybe... if the actual price is lower than your offer price then you get the money and the crop.
There is more to the futures market than HN learned from the Duke Brothers.
(Just make sure your futures broker accepts delivery, otherwise there's funny stuff happening)
If you grow corn: It can be sold as a future, and you can have crop insurance on it.
IM not sure you grasp what a future is in the case of a farmer...
Now if your in construction, or buying fuel a future can be insurance. Or a risky bet.
None of that is like your heath or home owners or car insurance.... unless you dont have them.
How an Iowa farmer pushes through less-than-average crop yields - https://www.marketplace.org/2023/07/27/how-an-iowa-farmer-pu...
> Ryssdal: Yes. What about prices? When you take it to market — or when you’re going to take it to market — are you selling futures?
> Hemmes: Well, a lot of people do that. I forward cash grain, or forward contract. Right now, I could sell delivery in March and set my cash price, or set the basis. A lot of people do options to set that bottom. But I’m telling you, Kai, I need some kind of collar because of the whiplash I’ve been getting from these markets — they’re up one day 50, down 40 the next, and everything adds to it.
Farming is “not easy and it’s a lot of risk,” says Iowa soybean producer - https://www.marketplace.org/2024/05/28/farming-is-not-easy-a...
> Ryssdal: Have you sold your futures yet? Have you sold any of this stuff that just got in the ground?
> Hemmes: I have. I’ve sold about 30%. Our co-op gave me a heck of a bid. But it’s kinda like wait and see because this market just keeps going. Like soybeans are down 18 cents today and then they could go up 50 tomorrow. Who knows?
Having home/car/health insurance protects you against it being destroyed. Buying fuel futures protects you against the price of gas spiking. Having crop insurance protects you against your crops being destroyed. Selling crop futures protect you against the price of your crops falling.
It's all protecting you from events that would seriously hurt your finances, aka hedging/insurance.
I can see that, but they do know about how pricing might be fixed. Obviously subsidies make a huge difference, so some crops might have a fixed price (ie things that are used to grow biofuels) vs stuff that has a free market vs single large buyer.
i've herded cattle on an aussie ranch as part of a working holiday. fun experience as a young man, but absolutely convinced me that IT was the right choice.
But there's a pretty big swath of cities between {Cheesecake Factory} and {Manhattan}.
This will entirely depend on local market conditions and suchlike, of course.
One of my neighbours produces 10,000 litres of wine/year on ~4 acres of vines. An acquaintence runs a market garden on less than an acre. Another raises pigs in a barn on half that.
Take a trip through rural America sometime and look around. You'll see lots of very poor-looking households, but if you look carefully you might notice that they keep chickens and have a garden, and larger properties have more in the way of animals. Many are dirt poor, but they live off the land, and can afford to be dirt poor. Not romanticizing it or anything -- the homesteadies I know are not into being dirt poor, but they are into being more independent and living off the land so as to stretch their savings.
I'm not suggesting everyone can be Jean-Martin Fortier, but with sufficiently low overheads and access to somewhat affluent markets, it is possible to make a living on an acre.
This seems like an unnecessary distinction with no purpose other than to gatekeep. A bartender is still a bartender if they only work weekends. An artist is still an artist if it's not their dayjob. A barber is still a barber if they have to work another job to make ends meet.
No, you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking that farming an acre or two is going to replace the income of most 9 to 5 jobs, but at a time in history where we absolutely need to be working to preserve and promote small-scale farming, we shouldn't be gatekeeping people.
Price contracts are a thing. You can do this in new england with fuel oil for heating. It is fairly common.
But futures pay today for a product at some later date. It's a loan as well.
And as a producer it's not just a hedge on price. What happens if your expect to yield 140 bushels of corn an acre, and only get 130? Your crop came in, so no insurance, how do you make up the missing bushels? You're buying those futures back or delivering the contract even at 10x the price.
That isn't an outcome one expects from a hedge or insurance.
There is a reason that there are specialists in marketing and delivery of products with futures markets that help them plan.
> But futures pay today for a product at some later date. It's a loan as well.
This does not compute. You say forward contracts are common but futures give you money today? Futures are standardised forward contracts, you don't get any money when you open them unless your futures are different than mine?
> And as a producer it's not just a hedge on price. What happens if your expect to yield 140 bushels of corn an acre, and only get 130? Your crop came in, so no insurance, how do you make up the missing bushels? You're buying those futures back or delivering the contract even at 10x the price.
Exactly right hence why I said 'some'? You hedge when you can to lock in e.g. aforementioned 30%.
> There is a reason that there are specialists in marketing and delivery of products with futures markets that help them plan.
Completely agree - but it isn't that complicated with futures. Now options...
Futures are technically different than forward contracts... the former is public the latter is private.
But a lot of the people doing cash forwards, trade futures on the same products, and call and put options on those futures.
Then add actual insurance in on top of all that...
There are farms that look more like Wall Street Banks with how cover and leverage.
I guess a better way to put it is: In the right package, selling futures can be a part of an effective insurance strategy for farmers.
- Lived in a big city
- Lived in a rural community
Or as I heard it quipped -- you don't love something for it's best bits; you love it because you can tolerate its worst bits.
Growing up I yearned with a passion to live in a big city, but having lived a quite a few, I'm much less enamored with city life, at least in the US. Traffic sucks and often where you want to go is spread out geographically, so you're forced to deal with traffic. I also hate that there is so little greenery, except in a handful of places that are super expensive to afford to live near.
That said, cities do offer quite a few positives. Way more things to do and more people to meet.
I think many European cities seem better designed for foot traffic and bikes, with more nature interspersed, than US cities. Having only visited Europe, I feel like I'd much prefer to live in a European style city than many of the major US cities. Then again, since I didn't live in Europe it could be that many of the places I want to go to on a regular basis (like a climbing gym) are in out of the way places. Obviously not all European cities are the ideal (really hated the hustle and bustle in Rome for example), but many more cities I've visited there seem like nice places to live (I even fantasized about moving to Copenhagen for a while).
For our purposes (which in this subthread is determining whether grandparents idea that "45+ prefer more quiet and wish to move to the country" is valid), this distinction doesn't matter - since this is not about whether that group is justified in preferring the country, but whether they prefer it or not.
Whether there are a large number of people who believe in something that's incorrect is immaterial, as is over-counting kvetching without any intent to follow through.
I think a dial is preferable to either of the (urban, rural) choices.
I love dense, urban places and I also love quiet, secluded rural places.
In my mind, the ideal living situation allows one to quickly toggle between the two.
This is possible in the Bay Area and is the reason I moved here 15 years ago.
I've also lived from the deeply blue-collar (father's small business moving machinery) to the tech world. I find myself marketing my consulting business to small to medium-sized blue-collar/manufacturing businesses. Even though their Trumpist attitudes irritate me, I understand their world better than I do that of urban-centric, and their political views do not stop me from taking their money. It makes it easier for me to charge them the rates that I do.
I think the quip is a good one. However, I feel it could be better phrased as, "You need to seek out the best bits to remind you why you tolerate the worst bits."
When I'm having a bad day, and I wonder why I'm putting up the crap in my life, I walk into my yard, look at my garden with cucumbers, beans, cauliflower, and something like 20 tomato plants next to raspberries, blueberries, sour cherry tree, and Apple tree. And if it's a really really bad day, I will go and settle into the hammock and stare at the sky.
When I can finally feel gratitude for the life I have, then I go back and deal with the crap that lets me afford the life I have.
On one of my worst days of dealing with needlessly pedantic and blocking colleagues at a previous job, I sat out in the rain under an umbrella and watched ducks enjoy a pond.
Came back in, my coworker asked me if I was okay, and I just told him "Ducks don't mind when it rains."
It's become my mantra for rough days.
There is so much to be said for nature, and I feel like you can get 80% of the nature benefit by investing 20% time into it.
Why build a yurt, when you can get most of the benefit from a hammock? Why farm commercially, when you can get most of the benefit from a hobby farm?
Doesn't that possibly reflect your social circle more than a statement about the public at large?
But I'll confess, I find people who talk like that a little obnoxious and I'll admit I may self select and avoid those people.