(this is just a joke - of course farmwork still has physically demanding parts)
Day on a farm:
She looks very happy!
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.
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.
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
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.
i had a mini slut phase recently and everyone who touched my skin said it was really soft, like women who i thought had soft skin told me how soft my skin is. this is what finally pushed me to really look into Ehlers-Danlos and learn that i have it. having very soft skin without really trying is one of the features, but there are a lot more. it sounds to me like you might have it too. worth looking into.
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.
The double “wouldn’t” is purely an embarrassment. Such garbage!
OP should hang their head in shame.
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.
AND you need to be a hacker!
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.
Corporate farms, typically not. Independent smaller farmers it is.
Granted you paid for that John Deere update.
Automated farm equipment is amazing now. Even small operators can use software that dispenses different amounts of water, nutrients, fertilizer or whatever on different parts of a field, based on a map deveoped from soil testing and last year’s yield - as measured by harvesters that weigh how much material gets harvested from every spot on the field. The operator’s main job is to be there in case something goes wrong.
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. Fire pit and seating area in the middle, so far, so good.
Is this some kind of joke? My aunt Lisa has worked on a farm for 40 years doing back breaking work and has multiple ruptured disks and numbness in her feet. Carrying firewood and bags of chicken seed all day would send you home to your Gameboy and warm blanket. I bet you wouldn’t even last a day. I bet you wouldn’t even try because you’re probably on the Atkins diet and afraid to eat real food. My aunt Lisa has broken her body farming. She is tough and strong and you will never be like her. I bet you would be too scared to show this meme to her.
Is this pasta I don’t know? If not, Atkins hasn’t been a thing in ages. Also, working out properly is a superb supplement for workers of physical jobs to protect themselves from accumulating damage.
All pastas start somewhere. Maybe I’m not much of a chef
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
don’t you just shoot babies?
I would counter to say that your aunt is in the minority. If you are talking about hauling individual bags of chicken feed, you are already talking about a much smaller scale than what the meme is poking at. This is more about the industrial scale farms, typically growing corn or soy beans, using combines, harvesters, and other specialized equipment worth millions. This high end equipment has removed all the backbreaking labor you are referencing because that would be time inefficient and cut into profits. When you are plowing, seeding, or harvesting 1000 acres a day there isn’t time to haul anything by hand. If you take time to baby a single plant or animal then you are taking time away from caring for the larger field or heard.
Small family farms, like the one you are implying, have old equipment (due to high costs) that embody the hard farmer life, like the open seat tractor. Big farms who spent 400k on their tractor have enclosed cabs with air conditioning and computer controlled auto steering, like the one pictured in the meme.
