Over the past decade and beyond, I’ve been to rural areas in two countries (US and Canada), and hardly ever see anyone working in the fields. How much farm work is really done nowadays? Are most of the farms that you can see from the road idle, or am I just horribly unlucky, or has technology and techniques advanced so much that you only need to be in the fields for a few hours at planting and a few hours at harvest, and for the rest of the year you can just monitor the crops remotely?
It’s so mechanised that fewer and fewer people are employed on the land, and those that are spread themselves thinly.
I heard a great quote from Jay Leno about cars that also translates to farming:
“In the past technology was expensive and labor was cheap. Now technology is cheap and labor is expensive.” (I know, Heavy. And from Leno to boot!)
Therefore. . . .far, far cheaper to use machinery to produce crops than manual labor.
I worked as a farmer once, briefly. In four weeks I didn’t see a single field, but I did help fix a lot of machinery. Farming these days is mostly indistinguishable from light industry.
Three reasons.
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Farmers mostly only have their big tractors and combines out in spring and fall, when they’re planting/harvesting. Because they’re limited by weather and field conditions, they don’t dawdle in one place too long during those periods. (it’s not a few hours at planting and harvesting, it’s more like a few 18-hour days.)
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Between planting and harvesting, a farmer may check a given field every week, or even more often. However, he most likely uses a pickup truck or an ATV to do it, which you’re much less likely to notice.
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Farms are big, and a lot of the fields are located away from the roads, so the farmer may be out in in the backl somewhere where you can’t see him from the road.
I spend a lot of time in Amish country in Ohio and I rarely see people out working. Possibly because I go there a lot on holidays, or they are just working early in the morning while I am there in the afternoon.
However, I went to Northern California and went by some farms on the way from Mountain View to Santa Cruz, and saw lots of what was obviously migrant workers hand-picking crops. It was weird to see because I just never see people - let alone Mexicans - hand-picking crops out here.
Monoculture has a lot to do with it, too. If you have a mixed-vegetable farm like some around here, the only off time is maybe a couple of weeks in June between greens and tomatoes. Maybe. But if you have a hundred acres of soybeans, there’s not much to do while they’re growing, I’d guess.
I was going to say, there are definitely tons of Spanish-speaking immigrants (legal or otherwise) picking grapes and oranges during harvest time.
Back in the days I flew small airplanes at low altitudes over rural areas I saw farmers from the air far more often than I ever did from the road, and yes, they most often were in pickups/ATV’s/other vehicles suitable for such terrain, and yes, also frequently away from the roads.
Once the corn gets to five feet it’s not like you can see very far into the fields anyway. Much easier to see farmers in fields of things like soybeans or other crops that don’t grow so high as corn.
What exactly do you expect farmers to be out there doing?
My familiarity is mostly with grain farming…in that sort of farming, as kunilou has already noted, the “heavy work” in the fields is limited to fairly narrow windows for planting and harvesting. A farmer might pay $100K or more for a combine, but only use it for a few weeks out of the year, at most.
In addition, most grain farmers (corn, wheat, soybeans) are farming a large number of acres – what I recall, from a few years ago, was that most Midwestern grain farmers had to farm at least 1000-1500 acres in order to cover their fixed costs for equipment, and that some farmed far more than that.
Most of the farmers I’ve spoken with don’t actually own that much land – they might own a few hundred acres, which probably has been in their family for generations. They then rent other plots of land – often land which used to be farmed by another (now deceased or retired) farmer, whose family doesn’t care to work the land themselves. So, an individual grain farmer might be working multiple plots, which may be miles apart.
In some cases the land may well be owned by corporations who employ contractors to work on it as and when needed.
Singing to the corn to make it grow.
Zip-a-dee-doo-da! Zip-a-dee-ay!
Oh you know, farmer stuff:
Bending down to get a pinch of soil. Rubbing it between thumb and finger.
Squinting up at the clouds with their careworn eyes in their tanned leathery face, wondering if it will rain.
Hunting varmints.
Just staring at the crop, wondering when the locusts are going to come.
This.
Even before the advent of modern machinery there isn’t much to been done in the fields to begin with. The plants grow just fine on there own.
The reason you rarely see people in the fields is because anyone that has to actually do work in the field probably does it before you drive by. Getting up at the crack of dawn is a farmers life because you want to be done and out of those fields before noon.
If a farmer never goes out on foot to inspect his crops, he will never be outstanding in his field.
In the old days, you might also have farmers out in the fields looking for weeds or blight, and wiping them out before they could spread. Nowadays, though, that’s mostly handled chemically.
I have to disagree that people don’t work in the fields. You just have to be there at the right time. What is grown will make a big difference too. Hay requires you out there for three cuttings and bailings every year. Corn requires the field to be prepared, once a year, a herbicide application and then it’s picked. There are long periods where you don’t touch corn. Go to cucumbers, tomatoes or other produce and the hand labor goes up. Now you just have to be going by when they work, which is likely when you work and have to be paying attention.
I own a farm, and you’ll rarely see the Mrs. and I out in the alfalfa fields (unless we’r re-enacting ‘splendor in the grass’).
But nearby, my cousin has a strawberry farm, and from early to mid spring until the end of strawberry harvest, I think someone’s out there working whenever there’s daylight.