Neofetch developer archives all his repositories: "Have taken up farming" (opens in new tab)

Maybe they have saved enough from working in tech that they can grow vegetables for themselves in a very low scale way. Its nice to escape from the career you've had for decades. Sometimes its not even an escape from the career, but the career and the city you've lived in. Moving to the forest and growing some vegetables and raising chickens isn't that difficult. You certainly don't need "millions in equipment". Its exactly what I did.

I found it difficult to get a job in tech at the start of COVID after working in it for ~25 years. I moved to Michigan, and now live in the woods. My Cost of Living is a fraction of what it was. My mortgage is only 80% of what I was paying for rent in the SFBay area. Its peaceful and quiet here. It actually gets dark too. I no longer hear BART screeching on the rails at 2am or the constant flow of traffic. I.. do once again work in tech though at a much 'smaller' scale. My company is small and work demands don't dominate my life. I have balance.

This year I've planted ~200 onions, ~100 potatoes, ~100 garlic, ~60 strawberry. I have blueberry from a few years back starting to flourish. I have wild blackberry, and mushrooms galore. "touching grass" is a daily activity as we manage our small flock of chickens.

That's one type of farm. Depending on someone's financial situation and expectations, there are certainly other types. Taking up farming does not necessarily suggest that you're going to compete in the highly competitive world of agribusiness. I personally know a smaller-scale farmer who has a biodynamic farm and provides a high quality of life for his family. He has not invested millions in equipment to make this happen (not even close), but he certainly works hard. There's no debating that.

Every time this topic comes up a rhyme of your comment bubbles to the top and speaking from my own experience growing up in a winery. I can say: yes, it's hard, but no, it's not impossible to take up later in life. Stop assuming he just threw away his notebook and bought a tractor and stop spreading coffee table knowledge. Let people discover things for themselves, or even better, try finding things out for yourself. Because maybe, just maybe, you might discover that our differences are what make us unique and capable of achieving things in our own ways. There is no best practice for everything or everyone.

There's also the old joke about the farmer who wins the lottery. "I'm going to keep farming. And when the money runs out I'll find another way to keep farming."

I read someone who retires and "takes up farming" as retiring to a house in a rural location and maintaining a garden and maybe some small quantities of livestock.

IE someone who is not depending on the "farm" to be a commercially successful operation or is even attempting to run it as a profitable business.

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

A lot of people are heavily influenced by Youtubers and other influencers who conveniently leave out the earnings they get from their Youtube views, all while selling a romantic, self sufficient dream of living in harmony with nature.

In that regard Jeremy Clarkson paints a much more realistic picture, even though that show is very over the top and mostly scripted.

I grew up on a farm and was on track to take it over. I know how hard it is. And it was not the live I wanted, so I pivoted to online marketing and web development instead.

I’m a programmer with a degree in Agricultural Science so my opinion is oddly relevant to this subject. Please shut up and stop shitting on people’s dreams. Not everything is about profit and scaling. Anyone can and should learn to farm regardless of their background or education.

It's the two extremes of work. One is hard physical work directly associated with producing the things you need to stay alive, the other is purely intellectual work which is 20 levels of abstraction away from your necessities.

> Farming is hard work. Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.

It depends on the scale, I know 80+ years old people living in the countryside, still splitting their own wood, growing their own garden/orchard, manually removing potatoe bugs from their decently sized potatoe field, cutting grass with a scythe, taking care of their chickens/goats/sheeps... they're 100% self sustained and use tools from the 19th century they inherited from their parents. They're in better physical and mental shape than most code monkeys I know while being 50+ years older

I see this kind of comment every time someone decides to take a different path. Pessimistic sounds smart I guess. Well, you are wrong. I have done it myself, started a farm on a whim a couple years back, and did just fine! And no I don't know what hard work you're talking about, I'm much healthier than I was sitting at a desk all day long.

My Thai girlfriend enjoys her farm, spends a couple of hours a day to work on it.

Of course, it's not our primary source of income, as that is my work as software engineer. For her it's a nice hobby.

I don't think you'd need a degree anyhow. Plenty of stuff can be learned online these days. And you don't need a lot of equipment either, if it's just to take care of yourself or your family. Depending on your community, you might also be able to rent some equipment if you need it at times (my girlfriend rents some equipment, tractor or some such with a driver, to cut the rice, about 2 times a year, as do most people in our village).

If you have a bit of a garden, can easily start as a hobby, I think.

>Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.

Are we talking industrial scale? Because not every farming venture needs to reach that, and most smaller farmers don't have "college degress and millions in equipment".

And you can pick up a lot in a couple of years, I've had friends who made the switch (and extended family who worked on farming).

Not in the US though, but judging from the decent sized subculture of "living off the grid" (or close), it's probably even easier there.

Farm doesn’t always mean hundreds of acres and millions in loans. My neighbors across the street are farmers and live in a residential neighborhood. They have a quarter acre in the front yard for growing veggies and own a 1 acre plot just outside of town.

At some point sitting at a computer becomes unfulfilling and some point some people can’t take it anymore.

Yes, if you want to subscribe to the stereotypical unsustainable practice of running a mega farm. There is plenty of opportunities for farming on a small scale and selling your products locally or online.

I'm a little bit in touch with this particular demographic, and from what I've seen this has nothing to do with romanticism, and instead everything to do with a profound mistrust in technological civilization's ability to feed everyone into the near term future. Much closer to some sort of extreme insurance policy than anything else. There are systemic economic problems that can't be hand-waved away at this point.

Interesting side topic: did you know that while John Deere's top of the line combine is well over $1 million retail (and of course everyone else's models are similarly priced), that a model 42 combine from the 1960s will still go for under $1000 at auction, even as recently as last October, and is more than sufficient to harvest oh, probably even up to 50 acres over a few days? If one sells wheat or oats or whatever, there's no way to compete at market but if one only wants enough wheat to feed themselves for the coming year (and not have to buy seed again next), it's some absurdly small acreage. You might need like a fifth of an acre. There's still plenty of hard work, but mechanization solved some of the worst parts of that before we were even born.

You are thinking of big ag doing stuff like corn and beans with a combine. Farming can be as big or small as you want it to be. You can be a farmer on 1 acre of land. This is not a good take.

Someone could be going into farming for a low cost independent lifestyle, not necessarily as a profit maximization venture.

Corn or dairy cattle, absolutely. Oranges for concentrate, sure. Even cabbages for transport, right.

But there are other things there's demand for, or demand can even be created for, that do not have such vast efficient scales. Hand-reared escargot, or spinach grown within resonance of a woodpecker pecking at dawn, just two examples.

Funny how nobody ever says the same about software, which underpins the entire modern economy and has the power to irreversibly change the lives of billions.

If you want to make a solid living farming, then sure. However, hobby farms that break even or even lose money also exist and are probably the majority by sheer number. "Farming" can be as big or as small as you want it to be.

Distant family member of mine started a hobby farm in retirement and lived on it for probably 30 years until his death. He lived off his pension and savings, not his crops.

What you describe is how corporate farming is done in the United States. There are millions of people in Mexico, for example, who are farming, and they do not have college degrees or millions in equipment. They also work sunup to sundown, every day, with no vacations. "Right to repair" and John Deere are alien concepts to many of them.

This is a terrible, terrible misconception about what constitutes a farm and farming!

Yes you can 'farm' on an industrial scale, or you can 'farm' on your parking strip. You're right when it comes to the former, and couldn't be more wrong when it comes to the latter.

That's the same line of advice I give in most disciplines:

> Student: I've struggled with math in the past, what do I need to do to be ready for your class?

> Me: Take the previous class first. You'll get easy A's in both, you'll actually understand the material when you need it, and there's no real downside since you have a minimum of 120 credits to fill to be able to graduate anyway.

In some ways it ties into the "big fish in a small pond" theory of life. People who take that sort of advice have easy, stable lives. I'll keep giving it. Likewise, most people probably shouldn't jump into farming unprepared.

That said, life is short, and a year is a long time. If you can stomach the downside risk (losing every dime you poured into farming, having to work hard at it), by all means just jump in. There are vibrant communities willing to teach you everything you need to know, and you'll learn faster working on real problems you're personally experiencing than rote memorizing the tasks a seasoned master tells you to do.

If you want to mitigate some of the risks, perhaps start with something small enough you could manage it without millions in equipment (high-margin products like mushrooms and arugula -- and if you go with those, focus on distribution as a primary concern).

To be fair, most devs leaving the software industry won't have half the type of problems that actual farmers have - they have money, so they don't have the same pressures and they are typically doing some kind of boutique product.

I would love to "farm", but only as a retirement "job", and only with specific products.

It's likely more of a goatops reaction.

https://www.goatops.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26336880 (255 points on March 4, 2021 | 80 comments )

What's the definition distribution of "farming"?

My bias is not to go directly to factory farming or industrial agriculture, which sound depressing. I'd rather a smart and lazy approach, helping the land recover to a point and then stopping succession, as has been done with fire in the PNW mountain meadows for berry crops. I'm not under the illusion that the land-management practices of the Nisqually or Puyallup, say, didn't involve consistent work, just a different sort of work, one more within individual and small-group control.

If petroleum-fueled agriculture is "necessary", it's a mess we've gotten ourselves into.

I’ve done both and I’d prefer farming

I was a staff architect at a public company and started a trash cooperative this year

I 1000% prefer making my neighbors better off than some idiot CEO and all the assholes on the board and investors

Everyone thinks they're a born farmer until their first horn worm.

"I love tomatoes! I'm going to grow my own!"

wow what a coincidence so do these little baby moths

Don't get me wrong, growing your own food is neat, but you're going to trade the money you'd spend on veggies for time and effort trying to keep even a small back porch of plants alive. You have to be fastidious about everything from soil maintenance/security (from pests) to pesticide application.

When I started to study English many years ago, my mom gave me a book series titled America Today or something like that. The book was life changing as it made learning English so much easier than the Chinese way at that time and it taught me a lot about the US. The book 3 devoted many chapters to a day in someone's life, one of which is A Day in the Life of a Farmer. At that time, the US was the beacon of the modern civilization to Chinese people, a superpower that was far ahead of everything we did. And despite that the work of a farmer was still tough. They still needed to get up at 4:00am or early to take care of their livestocks. They still had to take care of their crops before the sun fully rose. They still had to handle many issues about their land, their equipment, and their business. They still had to do tons of intense manual labor. Despite all the toughness, though, the chapter also conveyed the idea that farming can be gratifying and fulfilling. I certainly appreciate this kind of optimism and appreciation, and the life an American farmer has a lasting impression until this day.

Running an industrial farm that makes money efficiently is different than living on a plot of land with chickens and cows, giving you a cheap lifestyle.

I agree, and I say the very same thing about software engineering. Yet there are plenty of managers who hire unqualified people coming from a 6 week coding bootcamp into teams with highly complex requirements and very skilled, experienced devs. So from that perspective, one would propably think that a 6-week farming bootcamp also gotto be enough :)

If it’s commercial farming, yea it’s not fun. Exposure to many chemicals/pesticides/herbicides. Animal cruelty on a daily basis — those poor chickens and cows stuffed into tight spaces.

But if it’s for sustaining yourself, it’s not so bad.

Personally, the only “farming” I would pivot into is vertical farming. The idea of turning what would normally be a massive operation out in the country into a self sustainable, climate controlled operation in an urban environment is fascinating to me.

Optimize crops for taste rather than pest or weather resistance. Combine it with the fact that transportation can be reduced significantly; and it’s a recipe for a circular and self sustainable ecosystem.

Not all farming is large scale.

A lot of actually viable commercial farms where I live are smaller than many hobby farms in the US, for a start.

What a lot of people mean when they say they are quitting to take up farming is pretty much hobby farming - where you may break even or turn a miniscule profit, but the main “goal” is to simply become a bit more self sufficient and do it for some sense of enjoyment.

The interesting thing is some small “hobby farms” are effectively experiments in permaculture or other forms of regenerative “living” that can be extremely cost efficient or even profitable.

I think this is a negative approach. This is an open source developer who donated his time and energy over years for practically free. The reason he is quitting open source development in favor of farming is because farming is a more rewarding experience.

The number one killer of open source projects is funding. It is demoralizing to spend years on something that isn't going to really put food on the table, and we do not live in a society that allows us to fully chase our hobbies and passions with complete abandon to that fact.

Speaking personally, being that most of my work is "virtual", I take up as much physical work as I can, and even create some out of curiosity.

I miss the physical world and being able to touch and understand mechanical objects. In time I have become a decent bike mechanic and I can do some plumbing and electrical work.

This is just to say that some of us end up craving contact with the physical world more, not less.

To be fair, I suspect they meant it in a more idiomatic sense. Not that they literally went farming. Sort of like when one says "water under the bridge" they aren't commenting on bridges, nor water.

I have done the farm thing for a while (gf to that time had a family farm). While manual labor can be rewarding, I have to say I was often bored out of my mind. And I usually never get bored.

Sounds like you don’t know how to farm romantically.

Not everyone is taking on farming as an alternative line of work.

I know a dev who's stopped working in his 40s (made huge money by being in the right startup at the right moment) and took up on farming, but not as a mean to survive rather than "fun".

He even ended up having quite some profit after few years by focusing on exotic edibles for gourmet restaurants, but obviously he doesn't make anywhere near the money he did as a developer, but he does love his life.

I can't lie, I aspire to do kinda the same and pick up on farming, but just for myself and family. The food industry is beyond disgusting and you just can't trust what you're eating, no matter how deep your wallet it.

Homesteading is more like hobby farming, and for some it's a retirement plan.

With all this tech youd imagine it should have become easier to self sustain.

Are you Jeremy Clarkson in secret :P.

Sorry but this is not the case everywhere. Some countries subsidise their farmers because they correctly determine that this type of industrial farming you describe is terrible for the environment.

gate·keep·ing /ˈɡātˌkēpiNG/ noun 1. the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.

> You need to be a welder, plumber, vet, horticulturist, builder, metrologist

I love this about farmers. They are the polymaths of our age and folks dont get it. Farming YouTube is a trip because there's more tech in a tractor than in some startups.

> and if you're doing properly, crooked accountant as well.

Yea, most people dont get what a "future" is, and why corn and lumber have them (but not onions... thats a lesson too)... The farm has the support of a lot of high finance and hedging exists not just as an instrument but has a purpose.

Ask a farmer about a grain/pork "Marketing Plan" and who they are hiring as advisors and where that person got their degree...

It's a complicated world and there are some interesting intersections out there.

I don’t know the details of this person’s situation, but farming is much more enjoyable when it’s done as a semi-retirement hobby than as a way to bootstrap one’s career.

The farmers I know in my family all struggled mightily because every year was about accumulating a little more capital so they could rent some more land or buy the next piece of equipment they needed to grow in a few years.

The people who do it as a semi-retirement after a different career often come in with funds to buy land (as an investment) and have some working capital up front. When the goal is more about getting any positive number out of the farm to offset property taxes and you’re not running it like a business where squeezing every penny out of rented land with rented equipment is the only way to make it to next year, it’s a very different experience.

Hopefully this person is lucky enough to be in the latter group and have this be more hobby than bootstrapping a farming enterprise.

Really this is if you're trying to be a high-volume commercial farmer. Homesteading is still hard work, but if you're growing food for just you and your family, it's a much less exacting science that requires much less equipment. It is startling how much a garden of various veggies and starches wants to grow and only needs a bit of help from you. Throw in some chickens and you've got a fairly big boost to your family's organic nutrition.

> if you're doing properly, crooked accountant as well

Don't know if it was intentional, but this maligns some of the hardest-working and down-to-earth people that I've ever known as crooked.

But perhaps this is just referring to taxes, but farmers are also not incented to fudge too much on their taxes: they receive subsidies, and very little is paid with cash anymore, so is easily tracked.

Sadly, most farms today are huge corporate operations, so perhaps that's what you're talking about, but out of the less than 25% of the remaining family-sized operations, most are not wealthy by any stretch. Perhaps that's what they're doing "wrong".

I think one of the reasons you can't really be crooked as a farmer is because it's a small community and everyone knows everyone else. If you rip someone else off, everyone will know. It's much easier to be crooked in a bigger city where there's another sucker born every day.

> I think it might actually be the least worst option - leaving it open as if you might return gives a false sense of the project, and passing to a successor is a lot of work.

IMO that's exactly it, the guy wanted to give a strong signal and not string people along. That I respect a lot.

> We really put a lot on the heads of solitary people with the open source model.

I don't know who is "we" in your sentence but "we the working programmers" are busy as hell and most of us are not as privileged to basically wonder what do we do with our time. Whoever has the time and energy and if they can muster the motivation, please help -- the OSS world desperately needs much more people, and has always needed them. The rest of us who have to prioritize well-being and family are excused for wanting to spend a few leisure hours a day.

This looks excellent. Is it worth it?

> I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...

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

My immediate first assumption was "he's retired from doing this and this statement is a reference to doing something very much not IT related, like goat herding or farming." I haven't moved from that assumption yet. :D

I mean yea, I read this as an idiom for "went to do something wholly unrelated to programming". Not as "I literally am going to begin farming". Like I would read anything from "restaurant owner" and "artist" to "flight trainer" and "corporate DJ" as all fitting under that.

everything is literal in programming communities, lmao.

> is the grass greener on the other side of the fence?

Was it?

A lot of things "for fun" are probably ok. The difficulty comes when you don't enjoy / tolerate the hard problems that come with doing it for an income.

Programming for fun is great too. Hit a problem that's not something you enjoy? Drop the project and move on.

The "its fun" vs "I don't tolerate these hard problems that come with the skill" is a significant disconnect that people have and one of the things that generates a lot of people starting something (be it a project or a career) and not moving up on it.

http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018...

> ... Then I went off to college to study architecture... and found that, while I liked many things about the field, I didn't really like to do the grunt work that is part of the architecture student's life, and when the assigned projects got more challenging, I didn't really enjoy working on them.

> But I had enjoyed working on the hard projects I'd encountered in my programing class back in high school. They were challenges I wanted to overcome. I changed my major and dove into college CS courses, which were full of hard problems -- but hard problems that I wanted to solve. I didn't mind being frustrated for an entire semester one year, working in assembly language and JCL, because I wanted to solve the puzzles.

> Maybe this is what people mean when they tell us to "find our passion", but that phrase seems pretty abstract to me. Maybe instead we should encourage people to find the hard problems they like to work on. Which problems do you want to keep working on, even when they turn out to be harder than you expected? Which kinds of frustration do you enjoy, or at least are willing to endure while you figure things out? Answers to these very practical questions might help you find a place where you can build an interesting and rewarding life.

> I realize that "Find your passion" makes for a more compelling motivational poster than "What hard problems do you enjoy working on?" (and even that's a lot better than "What kind of pain are you willing to endure?"), but it might give some people a more realistic way to approach finding their life's work.

Doesn’t have to be either or. Maybe he has some reserves but not entirely enough.

It pays badly yet it's the most essential bs-devoid job on this planet. That's showing how much our society is twisted.

Yeah, the ROI is way lower than tech.

You need capital for land (and if you are going to have this capital as a tech person, go invest it and get passive returns, or start your own tech company doing service work) + labor.

Your labor is worth less, and close to third world wages.

The economic value comes from improving the land with labor and tech. Your competition is paying the same wages.

I know 2 people doing this, both are on medicaid.

same. happy this is not another _why situation.

I remember back on box.sk network knowing a young guy who was extremely bright. He could pick up anything from programming to genetics. But I also remember him feeling burnt out in his early teens and taking a break from all things computer.

Really made you think about those brilliant minds out there and how they work.

This is accurate. My current job, is much lower than I was making int he SFBay area, but I actually have work life balance. I don't have to worry about my phone ringing at 2am, and I don't have to worry about yearly re-orgs or project managers who are "Agile Certified" but implement Waterfall.

However, taking less pay for “meaningful” work is frequently an exploitative arrangement.

Take your 500k of investments, move to the mid-west, retire for a few years and figure out 'it was not the dream'.

I did something like this, it was life changing. For the first time ever, I wasnt counting the days until retirement or a long 7+ day vacation.

(Edit for clarity: I ended up taking a job. Talented coworkers were more interesting than my hobbies + I contributed to the world which was cool. Made it so I didn't really want to retire, I actually enjoyed work.)

Yeah, maybe he means he’s just going to play stardew valley all day.

- "(Note that a single goat can go for about €1000)"

What a capricious market!

One has to wonder if this sort of thing would be less frequent if the West had a decent attitude regarding time off and vacations. Its inconceivable to me that folks in that part of the world don't get more than 2 or 3 weeks off every year, most often, unpaid.

(Dylan is an Australian - they only have a moderately slightly better attitude about vacation than the USA, alas. 4 weeks instead of 2-3, on average. /laughs in Austrian ..)

I hope one day it'll be easy to make a living doing several different things, and not just one thing for 8 hours a day.

You need ... surprise! ... breaks!

Unthinkable in the Silicon Valley hustle culture, but true.

> lusting after a central whole-house humidifier

These are not terribly expensive, although installation can be tricky if you're not handy. The humidifier, for me, is a godsend in the winter months. I had a cabinet style one before and I'd have to refill the water tanks daily, which was a pain. It put ~5 gallons of water into the air each day.