I was thinking about how 1000 years ago most people were farmers, which seems like a fairly simple stress free life where you only work about twice a year, planting and harvest (if you are not a dairy farmer). People today work every day, all day, in what seems like a modern form of slavery. Is this unnatural?
Your impression of farming life is off base. Farmers worked all year long except for during severe winters and droughts during which time they might starve.
Farming is unnatural. Nomadic hunter/gatherers spend a reasonable portion of every day procuring and preparing food all year round.
Modern office workers even take week-ends off! Throughout most of history, farmers worked every day.
What does “unnatural” mean to you?
Ha ha ha ha!
Oh, wait, were you serious? Never heard of weeding? Pest control? Pruning? Hedgelaying? Mending wall? Caring for the oxen/horses? Repairing tools? All that and numerous other daily tasks await a farmer between planting and harvest.
The farmers I know work long and hard every day. They need fallback plans for the times the weather screws with them and they maintain/repair equipment that their livelihood relies on.
Most of the farmers I know also have a job away from the farm so there is always at least a trickle of income.
Has the OP ever met an actual farmer? Farming is still to this day a back-breaking, thankless job – even with modern machinery, access to irrigation, pesticides, fertilizers, anti-fungals, drought and pest-resistant seeds, etc.
What’s unnatural about modern work is fixed hours and wages, defined duties, free weekends/holidays and for a segment of the workforce, working sitting down all day.
Farmers/herders and even hunter-gatherers, if they just spent most the year as idle layabouts chillin’ out, would starve.
I don’t know too much about farming 1000 years ago, but my grandparents and great grandparents farmed were farmers until the mid 1950s.
Even though they were primarily wheat farmers, they also kept chickens and a cow or two and geese, pigs and goats - for the family. So even in the middle of winter, in a blizzard, those animals needed to be cared for. They also needed to be butchered and processed. The family garden was three acres - beans, cabbage, beets, peas, herbs, squash. Not including the raspberry and strawberry patches. Gardens are in continual weeding, thinning, processing, planting, harvesting - and then canning.
My grandfather was an excellent mechanic - you had to be. You had to take care of the tractor yourself. And the truck. You also had to be a good builder. Barns, chicken coops and houses all need constant maintenance. Fences need mending.
As an early 20th century farmer, you worked every single day. Maybe there were months (January) where you only had three hours of work in the day - feeding animals and general maintenance.
Obligatory Office Space scene discussing this.
It depends on your definition of un-natural. Sitting at a desk all day long affords a lot of people the ability to have leisure time, in which they can spend focused on other interests. I would not call that slavery, it’s just that at the present time, there are a lot of jobs that only manage information, without either the daily need to find food or grow it.
Sure, there are those that don’t have to work and have unlimited leisure time and resources - would that be considered a “natural” state of things?
Where can I sign up for one of these twice-a-year work farming jobs? I’m in!!
BTW, hunting and gathering is unnatural (well, gathering might be OK as long as you don’t use any tools). Swinging from the trees and picking fruit is where it’s at, baby!!
What’s ‘natural’? Anatomically modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years. Agriculture - keeping animals and growing crops - has only been around for maybe the last 20,000 years.
I see no reason to believe that farming is appreciably more ‘natural’ than factory or office work.
Yeah, farming is fucking HARD. I’ve known several, and it’s much more of a 365 day a year job than you think. There’s just a lot of work to do, and in some cases, not much time, due to seasonal or other considerations.
But I feel ya; there’s something just sort of cognitively dissonant about spending 8+ hours a day sitting there, working, and not actually DOING anything that you can point at, show someone or take home with you.
I think what brought it home to me was when I was trying to explain to my son (then 4) what I do for a living, and he was baffled- he didn’t get that I didn’t fly a plane, drive a train, grow crops, dig holes, or otherwise do something with an obvious physical product or tangible service at the end of it.
My father was a VP at a company. I had no way to tell what he actually did growing up, later I found out his job was largely as a company representative, plus paperwork. Turned out my uncle, his brother, had the same kind of nondescript job. I’ve worked in IT primarily and even though the scope of what I did was broad, especially when I ran my own company, I could at least tell people I was a computer programmer. Early on people had no idea what that meant but as the modern era of technology descended upon us at least most people accepted that as known type of job even if they didn’t really know what it involved. Eventually everyone would say their teenaged son, nephew, neighbor, etc. programs computers too and I’d just smile and nod. Sometimes I say I’m a software engineer now just to avoid that part. Most people outside the industry still aren’t quite sure what that means.
Forget farming, let’s go all the way back to hunter/gatherer.
You think you just waited for ripe fruit to drop off the tree so you could sit around the fire and invent language? Hell no! You had to forage, which meant walking around for hours looking for seeds and grubs, trying to get them before the animals did. Hunters and fishers might go days without catching anything, or their prey might turn around and attack them. Plus there were stone knives to shape, dead to be buried, rival tribes to defend your food against, etc. Pretty stressful overall.
In some areas like tropical islands, life was really easy most of the time.
But yeah, having spent summers working on the family farm, it’s hard work. My Cousin and I were sent there every summer, from ages 8-12, and trust me they kept us busy. Feeding the chickens, weeding the family garden, picking bugs off (and feeding them to the chickens, which was fun), taking animals out to pasture and bringing them back, getting eggs…
I honestly think every kid should do this.
To add to the above in the past just running the household took an enormous amount of time. Making clothes, washing clothes, cutting trees for firewood, splitting the firewood, keeping the stove filled with wood, growing a garden, cooking…: the world now has all kinds of time saving methods, people purchase already prepared what in the past they had to make.
I’m by no means an expert on farming (modern or otherwise), but I met a number of grain farmers (primarily corn / soybeans) through my job a few years ago, and I know some dairy farmers, as well.
The concept of a highly specialized farmer, whose operation encompasses only a single crop (or a single type of livestock) seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon, and Dangerosa’s description rings true to what I’d been told.
My conversations with grain farmers indicated that, while there are certainly ebbs and flows to their workload (i.e., planting and harvest seasons are just insanely busy), they rarely (if ever) have significant lengths of time in which they have no work to do. Unlike livestock farmers, it’s easier for grain farmers to take some time away from the farm (e.g., vacations in the winter, visiting the state fair in the summer), but they always do have plenty to do, year round.
It’s nice that in a bad harvest year, farmers may have known months in advance that they wouldn’t be able to put aside enough food to survive the winter.
So they could relax and party on, while they still had the strength.
Nature, Mr. Alnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.
All kinds of things we do every day are unnatural. Like wearing clothes, crapping in a toilet, and posting to Internet message boards. I don’t plan to stop doing any of those things just because they’re unnatural.