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Senior software engineer and farmer here. I approve.
based
Farming is only fun if you already have enough money that you don’t actually have to farm if you didn’t want to.
Otherwise it’s hard work for low pay that is very hard to buy yourself into if you weren’t born with some land.
When they say the goal of many a software engineer is to become a farmer, it’s quietly implied that you have to first make bank as a software engineer and then farm as a hobby while at least semi-retired rather than depending on it for survival.
I know people who are doing this and are happy. Half time spent farming, half time CEOing a software startup (not a silicon valley hustle culture 996 one though), and you get to take meetings in your own personal forest.
[I]t’s hard work for low pay that is very hard to buy yourself into if you weren’t born with some land.
It’s certainly hard work and low pay (compared to software engineering) in many cases, but it is rewarding.
As for the land, that really depends on the scale and the country.
At the end of the day, farmland is going to earn a similar basic return to whatever other capital asset, and while farming labour isn’t unskilled the amount of people raised in it means it earns like it is.
Nobody who says this is picturing manhandling half-dead battery chickens, and it’s usually someone white who isn’t going to move to the mountains of Ethiopia to farm subsistence crops and cocoa. That pretty much leaves something land-intensive.
I did talk to someone on Lemmy who made it work with ranching, but ranching is definitely not a good earner right now, and a lot of people are leaving the industry. Modern crop farming seems a lot like a desk job on wheels. Mainly, I think people just want space and fresh air, and have no idea what rural life is actually like.
Yup. My extended family is farmers. They got out of livestock decades ago because there was no profit at the scale they were willing to do it in and animals smell terrible at (abusive) scale. Corn and soybeans, they had a contract with a major company for sweetcorn last I heard.
I love the idea of an air conditioned tractor cab that’s mostly run by GPS and lets me sit around and listen to podcasts while babysitting the tractor, but I don’t want to live in Bumfuck Iowa so I didn’t go into farming.
And there’s other babysitting-type jobs out there, if that’s what you want. Actually that’s one sector poised to grow a lot do to AI, because AI needs hella babysitting.
The goal I had for my first vegetable garden was to produce enough food to last a month. I was able to achieve that for under 50$ in parts. More recently I’ve been getting into fruit trees which has been a little more expensive because I’m not doing to grafting myself. You don’t have to feed the entire neighborhood yourself, and will like 30min of effort a day you can have more than enough for your own needs.
If you’re not eating anything else, but still have a year-round growing season, it takes an acre or two for modern agriculture to feed a person. That’s a lot by city standards, but not in general (it was more like 60 in pre-modern times). It’s basically what the Ethiopians mentioned are doing, plus the cocoa so they can have things that don’t grow on trees, as well.
and will like 30min of effort a day you can have more than enough for your own needs.
Mountains of human experience suggests it takes a lot more effort than that. Have you had to deal with pests, drought or disease yet?
You might still come in under 8 hours a day, but then you add in the cash crops… Again, this is something only white people generations away from subsistence farming seem to think will be easy.
I’m not saying you need to grow enough to feed a village on 30min a day. After I got everything prepared I water every other day if there’s no rain and spot weed when I feel like it. My goal was enough for like 50 meals from a small garden and anyone can easily supplement their diet without that much effort. Hobby vegetable farming and industrial agriculture are two different things and as food insecurity worsens and costs go up, it’ll be a valuable skill to have. For me it takes more work to preserve the food than it does to grow it.
Sure, absolutely it’s a great skill to have just in case. Ditto for preservation.
It’s always a balance of what you can afford, what you want to do, and what your market can bare. You may love raising chickens, but eggs will almost never pay off. I love hot peppers. But I can’t get by growing just that. It is skilled and complicated for sure.
I don’t know where you live but round here if you want to raise chickens you gotta first buy some chicken quota (I am serious).
So you are in the hole before a bird lays its first egg.
I’m in Japan. It’s not worth it on my scale to even try. I do plan to get chickens for our eggs (and bonus bug eating and compost helping), but otherwise I’m just in the veg business. I have full English support and website which helps me find my market
So do you have a kind of mixed farm + social media presence thing going then?
Kinda. I don’t use most social media, which I suppose is not super helpful
This Lemming rural-s.
Neofetch dev?
nods
Neofetch Dev. God bless 'm
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As a programmer who grew up in rural nowhere-land, I’m convinced most people who glorify farming have never spent a day on a farm doing any actual work.
Either that or they’re isolationist due to being religious nutjobs (solidly 1/3rd to 1/2 of people in the middle of nowhere IME)
The dream is to get rich programming and THEN start farming. When you don’t need to do it for income. Nobody mentions the first half usually though. I’m sure some do actually think they want to make a living off farming, good luck to them.
Best of luck with it fam. Good to know there’s a healthy exit somewhere out there.
I have been existing in a superposition of both of these states for a few years and really like it.
During the day I’m a senior engineer on embedded c/c++ stuff. During free time at home I dig in the dirt and build shit and do my “farm chores” like tending to my koi pond. Feels good man.
I think most people would agree that fresh air, exercise, hobbies, and personal goals are good for your body and mind. It’s still wild when I notice it actually working.
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Your comment was auto-removed for profanity, an admin will review it and undelete it soon if there has been an error. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Profanity is against the rules here? It doesn’t say so in the sidebar
No, it’s not against the rules.
It’s a proxy (albeit a poor one) for abuse, we are trying to prevent new accounts sending abusive messages.
We are open to other solutions, but we need something, because we kept having spammers sending abusive tirades to other users.
Please reach out to Spyro@programming.dev if you have any better ideas.
I believe it is instance-level, or at least that is what I saw in another thread (the instance mods can filter that)
Ugh, this type of automod BS is what made me hate Reddit. And I thought Lemmy users hated censorship?
We don’t like it either, but we don’t have much choice.
It is to prevent abusive messages from new accounts, and it is a poor solution.
If you have a better alternative, feel free to reach out. Contact Spyro@programming.dev.
No worries at all, I totally get it. Sorry about that, I may have been too quick to judge.
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Me on Facebook in 2009
Is this how you get a Stardew Valley? I’m pretty sure this is how you get a Stardew Valley.
“LGTM”
*slams approve button*
Literally know 2 of these software engineers.
