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Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

>They didn't? Child mortality was 500 times as high as today in 1800 in the United States, and in the first half of the century, most of the people working on farms were slaves that I'm pretty sure had plenty of mental breakdowns even if nobody was treating and diagnosing them.

IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance (as does owning most low margin businesses) relative to most office jobs but...

To say claim most farm labor was performed by slaves prior to 1865 flies in the face of the results of about half a dozen federal censuses and childhood mortality says close to nothing about the lives of the people who made it to adulthood.

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Preindustrial farming involved a lot of downtime outside of the tropics. Essentially a few weeks a year involved 14+ hour days, but there simply wasn’t that much to do the rest of the year. It’s a common misconception that summer breaks where for farmers, but historically rurual areas actually had school in summer and winter with breaks in the spring and fall simply because that’s when there was a lot of work to get done.

For many in the US this meant a second occupation outside of farming, from preaching to making beer etc.

This fantasy needs to die.

When pre-industrial farmers were not in the fields all day they were not idle. They were doing tedious low intensity tasks all day instead of doing laborious tasks all day. A large part of the purpose of Sunday being a day of rest in protestant religions is that if you don't convince people there will be literal hell to pay for not taking a day off they won't take a regular day off and they will work to the point of overwork and reduced output.

Even a naive napkin math estimation of the labor required to keep a 1810s farm house and barn maintained and a few work animals fed and watered should make it clear how much labor needed to be put in before you even get to the farming aspect of it. And it's not like your wife gets to share the labor since she has her hands full with feeding and clothing the family. Pre-industrial farmers did not have the luxury of factory made clothes nor grocery store butter nor a galvanized barn roof nor a tractor.

In the US most of these people were literate and we have enough written accounts that we can accurately reconstruct how they spent their time. It suffices to say that they didn't deforest the northeast and carpet bomb it with stone walls by working 40hr weeks.

It’s simply historically accurate as seen by the plethora of medieval holidays not just Sunday. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

“And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall).

Which isn’t to say people didn’t get things done outside of work, but we don’t consider food preparation for example as part of the workday.

I think the problem with this debate isn't about how much people have worked in the past, but more about what actually is work.

For example, in today's society we do not think of basic chores like laundry as work, but in the past laundry was far more labor-intensive due to the lack of washing machines. Is repairing your broken furniture or clothes work? Is preparing your own food work? Those things are trivialized in today's advanced capitalist societies, but might have been a substantial part of life for people in the past. Nowadays most people seem to just buy new furniture and clothes, and even food preparing has been substantially trivialized by resteraunts, orders, takeouts, and readymade meals, so we're probably much more prilvileged than they were. But did the medieval people saw all of this extra work as "work" in today's sense? (Graeber's famous book ("Bullshit Jobs") kinda touches on this aspect in the end chapter, but I wish he've delved a bit more on it. There's a whole anthropology of work that's left unexplored...)

I just think that even the conception of work itself might have been too different to compare medieval society's work hours to today's. We in modern societies are too accustomed with wage labor, to even imagine that these people might not have even thought about tracking the hours they were "working".

I don’t disagree, however most people really didn’t have much stuff in preindustrial societies and it generally lasted a very long time. Having say a separate bed for your children was a sign of relative wealth. American plantation owners are the equivalent of local nobility not farmers.

Similarly, food preparation generally involved minimal ingredients and as little effort as possible. Women where often working in fields or tending animals even with very young children, not spending 4+ hours a day in a kitchen.

But what they did have was astronomically expensive. Prior to the invention of a spinning wheel (late medieval), it took somewhere around 100 hours of labor to create a square yard of fabric. At minimum wage, that would make a shirt using 2-3 yards of fabric cost about $1,400-2,100. Imagine if the cheapest clothing available was Gucci and you were making minimum wage, and that would be almost as bad as medieval peasants had it.

Most peasant women probably spent virtually all of their spare time spinning yarn[1]. Most holidays weren't days where they completely stopped working; they were just days where they only did light, low-focus work that wouldn't preclude having a conversation, like spinning yarn.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

> And it's not like your wife gets to share the labor since she has her hands full with feeding and clothing the family.

At least in here, a lot of animal care was traditionally done by women. So did quite a lot of field work - a lot of it does not require that much physical strength. And clothing is quite serious time consuming work, really. The amount of time required to make the fabric is quite huge.

Plus laundry. The invention of the washing machine is literally one of the things that allowed women to get jobs outside the house.

Laundry used to be extremely uncommon activity, among other things it damages extremely expensive clothing. It really only started to consume significant time as the production of textiles exploded.

It was done, it had to be done still. Just not that often and it was massive work.

Source: I visited laundry museum once and it was pretty clear they have done it.

It was done yes. Did they all wash their outer clothes every month let alone every week, no.

I don't wash my jackets or jeans that often either. Laundry was not "extremely uncommon" thing. It was thing that needed to be done in every household.

The switch to washday as in once a week washing cloth happened in period we talk about - after 1800. That is when you would spend one whole day in the week doing laundry.

Before that, you still had to do it, less often, but it took even more work due to lack of soap.

1800 was post industrial, the steam engine had been around for 100 years at that point. The spinning wheel invented around 1030 and slowly spread to Europe after that caused a 5x increase in cloth production. Even that was recent, almost 20,000+ years of slowly improving drop spinning where cloth was rare, then a seemingly ever increasing explosion of cloth production.

Really for most of human history washing clothes wasn’t that time consuming for average people. To the point where people today likely spend more time on it.

I grew up on a farm and we worked throughout the year on property my ancestors homesteaded in the 1840s. If there wasn’t field work to be done there was always a fence that needed to be repaired, a new trough to be replaced, or something.

I can’t see how it would be possible in pre-industrial time to have “not much to do” anytime of the year. Simply having the buildings stand up without falling apart is a surprising amount of work.

Nobody in my family history did anything but farming and joining the military btw

I don't think that's right.

Most farming was smallholdings. So there was some sowing during specific seasons, harvesting hay (winter food for animals) but you also had animal husbandry, shearing of sheep, taking them to pasture, milking of cows, rudimentary veterinary items such as helping the cow give birth, snipping the hooves off sheep so they don't get infected, disinfecting parasites, thatching houses and buildings, building wattle fences, clearing bush, making beer, fixing carts, ploughs and other farm implements, preparing for festivals, preparing fruit and vegetables for winter (preserves) curing meat (for winter), collecting fuel, going to market, etc., etc.

You also either hired a blacksmith or you needed to make your own tools (hinges, nails, hitches, etc). all quite labor intensive. There was no "Rural King" or whatever to drive down to.

There was little "downtime". There was always something to do. Something was in disrepair.

Do you have any additional information or sources on the subject. Not that I don't believe you, but I grew up in a post-industrial small farming community and 12 hour days were the norm most of the year. If the crops didnt need attention, there was always a long list of other tasks, digging wells, repairing equipment, infrastructure improvement. It would be interesting to see what changed.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

Summing up all of preindustrial farming covers a lot of area but for the major differences. Mostly vastly less land per farmer and minimal equipment, no insecticide and minimal fertilizers mostly animal droppings and marl applied early in the year. Limited and in many areas zero irrigation. This translated into less infrastructure, and fewer things to buy and thus maintain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marl

Really lack of resources was probably the biggest reason for lack of work. Logging, hunting, trapping, and fishing supplemented many early American farmers incomes but access to land for that generally wasn’t available in more settled areas.

Interesting, I suppose another factor to consider is the quality of life afforded by that level of labor and output.

The concept "cottage industry" or "putting-out system" was essentially work contracted to subcontractors providing the raw materials and collecting the finished products in pre-industrial Europe and America.

It was essentially making use of the availability of labor not working on the land. It was prevalent between the 15th to the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system

From the putting out system also emerged a network of proto-industrial business people enabling them to accrue the capital which would go on to become one of the catalysts of the Industrial Revolution.

Even so, these were times with no labor protections or modern civil rights. The putting out system wasn't an equitable system. People working in these systems often had to abide by the prices and conditions set by the businesses putting out the work to them. Child labor and domestic violence were part and parcel of life.

Thomas Hood poem "The Song of the Shirt" (1843) was published to raise awareness about the plight of the working poor at the time, notably homeworkers who easily fell prey to debt struggling to the point where they were forced to live hand to mouth. Charles Dickens would famously go on to deliver similar criticisms through his social novels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_the_Shirt

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...

"So, 7 hours for sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 for spinning, or 579 hours total to make one shirt. At minimum wage - $7.25 an hour - that shirt would cost $4,197.25.

And that's just a standard shirt.

And that's not counting the work that goes into raising sheep or growing cotton and then making the fiber fit for weaving."

https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

> Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). These figures come way down once we get the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, but what seems fairly readily apparently is that women did not necessarily work less so much as produce more, selling the excess via the ‘putting out’ system we mentioned last time and using that to support their families.

That’s quite regional and within a fairly narrow window.

“Between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold (the English population declined during the period due to the Black Death).” https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t... A lot of artwork is post spinning wheel which dramatically changed the economics of owning cloth.

This gets into some major differences over time. Leather or nothing used to be very common clothing choices globally. It’s only relatively recently that cloth has become so ubiquitous.

> That’s quite regional

AFAIK this was very similar worldwide

> and within a fairly narrow window.

it applies for entire timespan since cloth weaving was invented till invention of spinning wheel and other that came really late.

For most of human history it applied.

If you consider "farming" just working on the field.. then yes, they didn't do much work on the field itself. But there was a lot of other work to be done, from tending the animals, fixing/repairing farm equipment, making more profitable items (cheese instead of milk), making cloth, candles, etc.

Saying they only work a few weeks, is like taking someones code, counting the characters, measuring their typing speed and dividing the number to say that an average coder only works 5-15 minutes per day.

Candles where expensive, manufacturing them may have been part of a farmers income but only the relatively wealthy could afford to use them regularly. Similar to say honey.

Also to clarify they definitely worked more than a few weeks a year, but rather the absolute limit on how much you could get done during planting and harvesting limited how much you needed to work the rest of the year. Maintaining extra fencing is as pointless as having 3 plows if you can only use 1. Starting a new farm is an extraordinary amount of work, but when people have been farming the same area for generations there is only so much to do.

> but there simply wasn’t that much to do the rest of the year

This kind of assumes they did not needed cloth, bedsheets, candles and other produce. And especially making fabric is super time consuming. This also assumes animals don't need daily care outside of summer. No milking cows or goats, no animal feeding, no cleaning of enclosures.

The small kids did not needed care, feeding, watching. Food cooked itself.

> IMO farming has an absolutely terrible work life balance

Depends on your capital investment. Like anything, if you start with a lot of money it's a pretty sweet gig. If you're having to work an off-farm job to pay the mortgage then that balance can tip pretty quickly.

I would argue that if you just providing capital seed and oversight, you aren't farming, you are investing.

That's literally what farmer is defined as: Someone who owns or manages a farm. If farmers aren't farming, what are they doing?

My point is that a CEO at an investment firm that passively owns a farm is not a farmer, at least for the purpose of getting an accurate understanding of a farmer's work life balance.

Similarly, business operations desk jockey for a multinational ag business is not a farmer.

I think the parent post was referring to those who perform physical labor on a farm and directly oversee that labor.

Yes, I am gatekeeping being a "farmer"

Regardless, I was originally talking about people you actually think of farmers. Not people like Bill Gates who are technically farmers but have little association with the industry.

It remains that it is a pretty good gig if your capital costs are covered. I'm a farmer myself (I do the work, not just an investment), so I say that from first-hand experience. The amount you can make per hour of work is incredible, and the number of hours required per year are minimal. This isn't the olden days where you had to spend all winter in the bush in order to have heat. Pretty much everything is automated, outsourced, and outside of the peak season it is fairly hands-off.

The vast majority of farmers also work off-farm jobs to pay for those capital costs, however. That is where the work/life balance starts to falter. Both farming and working a full-time job can absolutely impact that balance.

Well that's interesting. What crop and acreage are you working with? I was a part owner of 100 acres of pistachios for 20 years and margins were very thin. Labor, electricity, and periodic capital inputs were the major costs. Labor and management was year round with no off season.

I in no way want to invalidate your experience, but don't understand excluding the capital input costs and claiming it is lucrative. How many years did it take to break even on your capital investment?

> What crop and acreage are you working with?

Corn, soys, wheat, edible beans. Understandably, different types of farms will be different.

> Labor and management was year round with no off season.

In this northern climate there isn't much you can do in the winter under the blanket of snow, save animal husbandry. And even then I know quite a few farmers with animals who only keep animals through a portion of year exactly so that they can have time to themselves.

> don't understand excluding the capital input costs and claiming it is lucrative.

Funny things can happen, but as a rule your major capital is retained. Farmland, if anything, tends to increase in value. I don't find machinery depreciates much either (the new stuff becomes way more expensive instead). On the day you retire, you expect that you will get back everything you put in and then some. That is why most farmers are willing to work a second job to build up that wealth.

Input costs are, of course, already factored in to the income potential of the business.

It is a low margin business when you're trying to pay for land (mortgage or lease), but one that is covered, there is significant income potential (with all the caveats of farming being unpredictable). And yes, that income comes as a product of investing. That's what farming is all about.

Thanks again for sharing. I wonder what keeps prices up or competitors out if returns are so high and work is so low for those crops. For tree crops, land is a pretty negligible cost. Water is about 35% of revenue, Labor is about 35%, and miscellaneous other costs are about 20%. Average profits are around 10% of revenue, but vary, and years with losses are pretty common.

Perhaps both of us are generalizing our experience to all or most farmers.

Regarding the capital discussion, the magnitude of the capital outlay and returns are relevant, even if capital value is retained. A $100k annual profit is good for a $1M investment, but crappy for a $10M investment.

> land is a pretty negligible cost.

Where for me rent is around 25% of revenue and would be more like 35% if I had to rent the acres I own. If you have the capital to buy your land, that's 35% of revenue you can realize as profit right there. The problem for the average Joe without capital is that if you are trying to rent or pay a mortgage, the profit diminishes very quickly. That is why it is pretty much impossible for regular people to enter the industry.

> A $100k annual profit is good for a $1M investment, but crappy for a $10M investment.

The growth in value of the business is most important, really. A $100k annual profit on a $10M investment is pretty good if the $10M investment is also worth $50M a decade later. That's what farmers bank on. Cashflow is necessary to keep things solvent, but not really why you're there.

It is no doubt one of those things that seems unsustainable, and funny things can indeed happy, but every decade I look back I kick myself for not investing more. At the end of the day it's pretty fun, though, so it's worth taking some risks just for the value of the enjoyment.

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