this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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I think a lot of people view farmers as stupid or the job as simple. I'm a software engineer who also started farming and there's a lot more to things than I think many realize.
It is very common for people who work in white collar fields to have incorrect opinions about jobs they have never worked, yes.
I would suggest blue collar workers aren't immune to that.
Few individual farming tasks are not simple, but there are so many of them that it gets comicated really fast, just like most things that humans do. My hot take: Farming, as opposed to most of those "complicated" tasks has been around long enough for humans to automatically divide it into tasks without actually thinking about it.
Maintaining soil fertility, crop rotations based on nutrient usage, etc. are things most don't think or know about. Even when to and how to turn seeds into food is more complicated (or can be, at least, to do it efficiently) than I think most consider. Edit: also forgot avoiding planting certain things in the same area that are succeptable to the same diseases in following seasons.
It is, as you point out, a lot of breaking down and scheduling tasks with multi-year planning (at least for my scale for rotations and fertility) which is probably why, as an engineer, I kinda dig it.
I'm an industrial-IT-meets-offshore-technician-thing, and my dad was a dairy farmer. He could never have done what I do. But I could never have done what he did either.
Being a farmer is like a handy man on steroids. Upkeep of buildings and machinery, building new where appropriate, caring for livestock, bus8ness finance/book keeping, ground water drainage/management, et al. And on top of that he was a semi-professional footballer on the side.
Yeah, I'm not even close to ready for animals yet, heh. Probably starting in 2026 or 2027 we'll get chickens, but getting a farmsitter for when we want to go on vacation is a concern