Ask Lemmy

I love when I see stuff like this online. As if farming is some luxurious fun time denied us by corporations.

I lived in a subsistence farming community in West Africa for a couple years. Farming isn't easy or fun.

People woke up before the sun every.single.day to go tend to the fields. They stopped working when they were exhausted from being out in the sun all day, or when they were finished with the field. The crops and the weeds grow when they want, not when you want.

If it didn't rain enough, they might starve, or their children might starve. Maybe both. The backbreaking farm labor was literally a gamble with their lives. Occasionally someone would get whacked by a tool and have to ask friends and relatives to farm their crops for them, often at a cost of some of that grain later. If that injury got infected, there's extra days or weeks you're asking someone else to do extra work to cover for you, and you owe them for this.

Everyone harvested crops at about the same time, flooding the market. But people also didn't just want to eat millet alone and wanted things like cooking oil or salt they had to buy. So being strapped for cash, they were forced to sell a lot of harvest up front because they simply couldn't afford to wait any longer for basic needs.

I can go on and on, but if you think being a farmer is so wonderful and amazing, I would encourage you to go do some WWOOFing and spend a few months on a farm and actually doing a real farmer's schedule and not some up at 9, done at 2:30 schedule.