(this is just a joke - of course farmwork still has physically demanding parts)
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.
They “wouldn’t wouldn’t last”? So they WOULD last. Double negative cancels itself.
Is that what you’re saying?
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.
Granted you paid for that John Deere update.
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.
I needed more physical fitness working at Tesla glueing cars together than I did on any of the farm jobs I’ve worked. But to be fair, the only farm work I haven’t done is harvesting things like strawberries and some other thing from a shrub (idk what it is), which are normally done by hand around here.
The double “wouldn’t” is purely an embarrassment. Such garbage!
OP should hang their head in shame.
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.
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.
Fun fact: you can have a soul sucking office job AND do farm work! Just get a horse or two!
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.
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 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?”
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
When the boss uses vicious mockery.
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.
They’ll never even make it to the office, because of all the terrifying minorities in the city who have the audacity to exist.
Day on a farm:
I was told there be goths in IT. Just fat nerds, mostly me.
You should have watched the promotional material more closely.
Pale, weird, hidden in the server room, and occasionally some Cradel of Filth, that’s just my office…
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
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.
Why wouldn’t they continue to lease out the plot and receive perpetual income?
Your great uncle used to be a farmer. Now he’s a parasite on other farmers as a landlord.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Ha ha ha, farming was hard work, like we have no idea, back in the pioneer days. Now? You can’t compete without the industrial operations, unless you have a niche.
These pioneers, they were harder than any of these gym freaks, they weren’t swollen, they were scrawny, wiry, and stronger. Muscle mass doesn’t mean strength necessarily.
Wouldn’t the pioneers drive boulders?
industrial operations
True for the corn and soybeans that cover vast swaths of this country, but a lot of fruits and vegetables are still very labor intensive. That labor is usually done by underpaid immigrants, who are definitely not swole, but are definitely in better shape then any of us.
He’s not wrong. Those muscles will atrophy in no time.
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.
Corporate farms, typically not. Independent smaller farmers it is.
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.
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
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.
Depending on the type of farming, the thing that can’t be done by machinery can get ridiculously small. To my knowledge, to grow cereal for example, intensive and repetitive efforts are not needed if you have access to machines. You still have to be physically capable but i wouldnt say it’s physically demanding.
