(this is just a joke - of course farmwork still has physically demanding parts)
Day on a farm:
She looks very happy!
Have you ever driven a tractor? It’s pretty damn awesome.
My wife works at a company that auctions off machinery of all types. The week before an auction, they let anyone who registered come into their lot and try out the equipment. You’re not allowed to move it much, but you can try out basically any other function.
I’ve operated all kinds of machinery I had no right to even try. Stuff that dwarfs me and/or could kill me at a moment’s notice. I didn’t usually try the bigger scarier stuff, but even machines like excavators, tractors, party busses, and super cars were enough to thrill me.
My wife’s work wallpaper is of me in the driver’s seat of a firetruck. I feel bad about that one - I accidentally triggered the siren and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. By the time I was ready to ask for help the yard crew had left. I really tried to figure it out or recruit help, but I ended up just leaving with it still on.
Some say you still hear that siren if you listen closely
Well, that just makes me feel sorry for whomever ended up buying it.
Your fake farmer toughness wouldn’t last a day working in an artificially-lit, soul sucking office cubicle for someone else’s profit!
Ha! Gotcha farmers!
Now if you’ll excuse me I need to cry.
The difference between physical damage and psychic damage.
Work in nuclear power! Experience both!
You can totally physically damage your body while working in office
I worked in an office environment that regularly interacted with field workers. They would often give us grief about how easy our jobs are (being in an air conditioned office, on chairs, etc). Two of them got injured and in order to keep them earning a paycheck, and keep their sick hours, they came to help us in the office. They were supposed to be on restrictive duty for months I believe. Within two weeks they begged to go back into the field doing anything except helping us. Haven’t heard any grief from them since. Haha.
This sounds like “would you want some torture for your sick period?”
“No, please! Don’t make me troubleshoot the printer again!”
I hope this email finds you well. Just to remind all employees that crying should be through as personal leave and signed off by your manager.
If you are struggling with mental health please use ai
Kind regards Hr
I wish we had a “bring your kid to work” day so I can show my child how it feels to be in four back-to-back 1-hour meetings with the most brain dead takes and people going, “Let’s table that” and “I hear what you’re saying and we’re saying the same thing” And then everyone gets drunk at Chilis before another round of four back-to-back one hour meetings.
That’s real endurance.
let’s take this offline can we have a sidebar 💀
You could even play fun games, every time someone says “moving forward” or “going forward” or whatever, kid takes a shot.
Hey if it makes you feel any better, most farms are corporate owned and so they get to work in hot, back breaking fields for someone else’s profit instead!
Most farms should be corporate owned in the US if for no other reason than to be a liability shield. The question is who owns the corporation and whether the workers are being adequately compensated.
Who owns farms: overwhelmingly it’s inherited wealth in trust to avoid paying taxes and run by incorporated entities.
Are the workers being adequately compensated… The answer changes depending on what color your skin is and where you were born.
Fun fact: you can have a soul sucking office job AND do farm work! Just get a horse or two!
bonus points if you have to deal with deeply toxic office politics
They’ll never even make it to the office, because of all the terrifying minorities in the city who have the audacity to exist.
only semi related but ive been gifted with soft skin, the kind that old men would handshake and say “you never worked a real day in your life!” i work a blue collar job. some people are just gifted.
Lol or you know how to use lotion?
Older gen hated sunscreen and lotion.
I don’t use lotion and still have very soft skin. I also work in a print shop with plenty of heavy lifting and manual labour.
Landscaper, a d likewise. Blisters beget no callous, only fresh pink skin to blister once more.
I have baby soft skin, as noted by male and female friends alike, despite working tons of physical jobs including driving fence posts for a summer. I’m pretty sure it’s a condition called Ehlers-Danlos, in my case, but I’m not officially diagnosed, just have every symptom. Learned about it through my DNA testing, there was a gene there that was connected to it.
From Bag Balm:
Originally, it was used for only cows’ udders, but farmers’ wives noticed the softness of their husbands’ hands, and started using the product themselves.
For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there who weigh a hundred and thirty pounds—and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling seventy-five pounds of marijuana across the desert.
~ U.S. Representative Steve King (R-IA) in 2013.
The heros we need
*The heroes we weed.
Now that’s a horror story.
I get it’s a joke, but… The strapping-est kids I knew growing up were farm kids. Throwing hay bales gets you jacked. I have also driven the air-conditioned tractor around all day though too.
Throwing hay bales gets you jacked.
Those round one are over 100 kg. What?
Because they’re not all the big round ones
A typical hay bale is rectangular and weighs about as much as a bushel of lemons. You pick it up by the twine and heave-ho until it’s in a big ridiculous pile on the truck.
Bushel of lemons
Heave Ho
Americans will use anything to avoid the metric system…
You pick it up by the twine and apply the ol’ hectoNewton metre.
There’s different sized bales. The big round bales you move with a tractor and aren’t getting tossed around, but the smaller rectangular bales get moved by hand a bunch.
…we had smaller rectangular bales, fun to stack in the hay barn and climb all over…
He’s not wrong. Those muscles will atrophy in no time.
But, to be fair, there is a difference between strength you get in the gym and practical strength. Its a lot of factors and i dont wanna write an essay but it is (kind of) true.
For anyone curious: the difference is, that farmers got more endurance with their strength (they can do physical labour all day long), while the typical gymbro can lift heavier weights, but not all day long
Your fake “work from dawn till dusk” work ethic wouldn’t last you 5 minutes in an office."
5 minutes at the office:
(this is just a joke too)
The modern farmer is now mostly a land manager. Most of the farms have been bought up by big companies, or have the land leased out to companies that primarily use migrant labour to do all the actual work.
My dad’s side of the family has a couple thousand acres in North West Ohio that I used to go up in the summer to work on in the 90s. It was hard work, I mostly moved bales of hay to feed livestock. However, once my great uncle got too old to actually run the operation he just started leasing out the land and that side of the family basically became landlords.
Now all my cousins have menial jobs in town and are just waiting around to inherit plots of land they can sell as soon as humanly possible.
Your great uncle used to be a farmer. Now he’s a parasite on other farmers as a landlord.
Eh, my great uncle wasn’t much of a parasite. He basically farmed until retirement and started to rent out his land to his neighbors who wanted to expand their operations. He only really charged enough to pay for the taxes and upkeep, but his son in law was the one who put it up for bid because he is a drunk.
Initially the son in law was supposed to take over the farm, but ended up losing his leg to a combine harvester. Word to the wise…don’t operate heavy machinery while severely sauced.
Why wouldn’t they continue to lease out the plot and receive perpetual income?
There’s not really a lot of money in it. The rent basically covers the cost of owning the land, its upkeep, and family expenses. By selling it they’d each get several million dollars.
Wouldn’t wouldn’t
does that work like a double negation?
It makes this a pure shit “meme”, post.
OP should hang their head in shame.
I dated a farm girl for a few years. Up hours before sunrise, you’re always lugging some large container/bag of something or making a million trips to handle it. None of them mechanize everything. It’s way easier than the dumb tractor days but it’s still no f’ing joke.
Is it true that farming isn’t physically demanding anymore? I figured it’s easier now physically, but you’ll still develop strength from the things that can’t be done with machinery.
My impression is that it is definitely not as demanding as when you were plowing feilds with a team of oxen… but it is still physicall demanding. Sure, machinaty automates a lot, but that just means you are more productive and end up doing more of the labor the machine doesn’t automate. Also from what I’ve heard, a lot of the work of modern farming is fixing and maintaining the machines that do the heavy lifting - which is also fairly taxing physical labor.
AND you need to be a hacker!
Depends on the farm. In NA, if you’re running a farm > 5000ac, you’re probably making enough money and are busy enough managing the finances and schedules to get new equipment often enough that you don’t have to fix much, or you can afford a mechanic. Things still need to be greased, and I’d challenge most of the desk jockeys here to slide under a seeder and grease and inspect 80-100 shanks every morning for 3 weeks and not complain about it. That’s the job of the guy behind the wheel, usually, because they’re the one to fix it in the field if it wasn’t installed right. And while you’re out there, shit breaks. You can shut everything down and wait for a mechanic, or you can get your ass under there and unplug the opener or replace the boots/hose.
Small farms, which today is a farm under 5k and is by far the larger amount of farms, you get to do all that yourself, and your equipment might be 30 or 40 years old, so you’re fixing it a lot. You still have to be able to lift a 100lb part into your machine or implement rather than fuck around going to get another tractor to lift it in, or it just isn’t going to fit where you need to lift. So you better have some upper body strength or some young prick to do it for you.
Yah, when everything is working and the GPS is engaged, all you have to do is watch for things wrong and eat the lunch you packed yourself to last all day in the first hour.
Nice, thanks for the insight!
Afaik it’s mostly medium-large fruits that still get harvested by hand. I knew a Norwegian guy who developed the ideal bodybuilder physique just from picking apples for a few seasons.
I don’t know much about this, but I’ve seen a bunch of videos of apple harvesting machines doing their thing. Just search for “apple harvester” and you’ll see a zillion videos
Maybe someone’s finally solved it over the past few years, but he was telling me that automating apple harvests was still a massive challenge about 5 years ago - there are/were machines to pick up fallen apples and robots for picking them individually, but you can’t easily shake all the apples off a mature tree for collection and a human can pick them from the branch far more quickly than a robot. From what I can see online there’s one that does it for young trees, but most of them are still glorified cherry-pickers.
Also those machines are expensive, and use fuel. The break even point if switching to a machine could be many years.
I work at a farm currently, today I spend a few hours picking rocks off a field after new soil had been spread there.
While most of the farming itself is done by machines, there’s a lot of maintenance stuff that needs to be done by hand.
Oh thanks for your insight. I feel the work “rocks” is doing some heavy lifting. I imagine they can be pretty large?
Something you can fairly easily lift with both hands. For larger ones we use a tractor and bucket, but for smaller ones it’s just more efficient to throw them in the bucket by hand.
The double “wouldn’t” is purely an embarrassment. Such garbage!
OP should hang their head in shame.
Repeating the last word of the top caption at the start of the bottom caption used to be a common ironic trope at least in certain circles, an attempt to make the meme shittier on purpose. An elegant literary device for a more civilized age…
Two words: Jeremy Clarkson
I’m in the best shape I’ve been in about 2 decades, and you know what my hobbies have been since spring of last year?
Amateur farmer, construction worker, and landscaper. And I guess mechanic too, to a lesser extent.
I live in a pretty standard suburban US neighborhood of single family homes, but my little fenced-in back yard is an active construction zone rather than a patch of grass.
My oasis is coming along pretty well. I can’t wait to share it with those around me once it’s more presentable.
It’s amazing what you can DIY if you’re willing to put in the time and muscle! Oasis made me think of my wife’s cousin’'s backyard outside of Sacramento. He put in a few small shade trees, lots of overhead trellises with vines and stuff on them, and burbling water channels here and there. On hot summer days I swear it’s 10 degrees cooler back there.
Yeah!
I have lamented in comments before that it seems like society treats technology and “success” as things that mean you don’t have to put in any effort to do things or learn things.
Admittedly, I’m an engineer and enjoy learning about the world and creating things starting with the basic building blocks, so I probably enjoy the learning and doing more than most. But I also recognize how engaging with the world around us is good for us, and my experiences keep reinforcing that.
If you’re documenting this anywhere, I’d love to see the work in progress.
Some parts of it, especially my pond, are an area where I’ve done a ton of DIY and learning and designing from first principles or close to it, and where other hobbyists often need help. So I’ve taken photos along the way and have pondered making videos at simmer point.
That might actually happen, but my number of projects in flight right now is kind of ridiculous, lol.
If you ever put those videos in an album somewhere, let me know. Doing similar projects on my property, always good to get inspiration
I will do that! It might be a while, who knows.
Do you have anything specific you have started, or have started eyeing up?
Previous owner just laid down hundreds of square meters of weed barrier fabric and then dumped gravel on it. We’re currently trying to re-shape the situation into a US southwestern-style dry garden.
Specifically, I’m in the middle of moving a good deal of the existing gravel, removing the turf grass, and replacing it with a free-draining landscape built around gravel mulch and natural stone. Planting areas are shaped to create an open, desert-inspired feel, with plants grouped in drifts and clusters rather than traditional flower beds. Gonna focus on species that can handle cold winters, hot summers, drought, and wind while still capturing the character of those landscapes.
Rather than recreating Arizona, adapting the look of the American Southwest to the Canadian prairie climate and growing conditions. Small palette of hardy plants like yuccas, prickly pears, ornamental grasses, sages, blanket flowers, and coneflowers.
Goal is an open, sculptural, low-maintenance landscape inspired by northern New Mexico- adapted to the Canadian Prairies.
