I searched the article for the two works, "Hard Work"
These two words are not included in the article.
I grew up on a ranch-style property with homestead type parents. It was a great experience that involved an endless amount of physical labor.
Some examples;
1. Every morning before school, feeding the horses and in the winter checking their water for ice.
2. Every day after school. Feeding the horses again.
3. Weekly shoveling of horse shit, into a manure spreader. The spreading it in the fields.
4. Lots of work on small engines that break in the winter the Colorado winter in a cold barn.
5. In the fall if we were lucky we would kill an Ekl. This required lots of walking around the mountains off-trail looking for an animal. Once found and killed the grueling work of and caring the meat to a vehicle on a road system. Then hours of butchering. Then more hours of hyde tanning.
6. Winter storms can be powerful enough to rip the tin right off the roof of a hay barn. After the storm, the tins got to be put back on. More hard work. Plowing snow is less physical but still works.
7. Spring is calving season, a calf may be born in the middle of the night. So you may be up all night supporting the birth. Then haft to go to school the next day and try learning while sleep-deprived.
8. Summer is hay season, you might get two crops if you're lucky. There is always stress around the harvest time. It rains in the afternoons in the summer. And wet hay can not be bailed. If it rains after the hay is bailed and before it is bucked into a barn the bails must be dried. I remember being about 8 years old. So small I could not lift a bale. Me and my two brothers were sent into a 300-acre field to rotate hundreds of wet hay bails. So that they would be dry before we loaded them into the truck. It was exhausting. A few years later, when I was strong enough to lift a bail of hay. We would spend a few days lifting bails onto a flatbed trailer and then lift and stacking bails into a hay barn. It is amazing how nice cold glass of water taste after moving hay bails all day.
9. I need to get back to work. So I will end with one last note on the work of homesteading; filling a pantry with canned goods for the winter is another major project which takes hours and hours of work
10. Damn my tech job is so fucking easy compared to the work I did on my parents homestead growing up.
11. Ok, one more: cutting and chopping wood for heating it the winter. We would need between 5 and 7 cords for the house depending on the winter. My Dad found a way to make sure this process was always grueling as I grew up and learned to take on more and more of it. That said, coming home from high school and splinting wood for 20min to keep the house heated for the night was relaxing after a day in class. I guess by the time I was ~15 my body had adjusted to the physical demands of my parent's homestead.
This. My father also has a farm, and I did a ton of manual labor until my mid-20s. It has zero romantic appeal to me, and I'm always amused by office workers that idealize rural living. For one thing, manual labor is incredibly mindless and repetitive. I am now a very comfortable urban dweller, and happy to not even have to shovel my front walk. I miss absolutely none of this lifestyle.
On the political front, I find idealizing farmers obnoxious because it's mostly a taxpayer-subsidized existence for extremely dubious reasons
There is not too much common with having a farm and having a homestead except (in most cases) rurality. To support your homestead financially you can be a farmer but you can be a software engineer too like I am. Farming is commercial activity to produce maximum amounts of "stuff" to sell others. Our homesteading usually produces some extra veggies too, but we share them with neighbours.
Nowadays a lot of the most boring and repetitive stuff can be optimised even in commercial farming. Chopping wood (and felling the trees with a chainsaw!) for the whole year, for example, takes less than a week of combined relatively relaxed and certainly not mindnumbing labor with modern tools. Personally I just often use an axe anyway since it gives a superb workout and I like it (I grew up in a farm so it has no novelty value for me).
Doing a lot of various small tasks that itself are boring and mindless when done commercially is really the best lifestyle I know. Of course, your idea of perfect life is allowed to be different.
There are homesteading purists who refuse to use even tractors and that stuff includes a lot more hard labour with little results. Oil has really changed the game and running a homestead doesn't have to be from zero to completely self sufficient in a year sort of thing. Especially those who haven't grown up in a farm (or homestead) need to start slowly to see if the reality of homesteading is what they really are after.
"I'm always amused by office workers that idealize rural living"
or welding, or plumbing, or...
However, I think there's also an effect of getting older, where you feel like you need more space and are willing to have a little more responsibility for it, because you then get to maintain it the way you like.
That doesn't necessarily mean farming or moving to the country, but it might mean shovelling and mowing.
There's ways to bite off a little. I live rural, work remotely have a decent garden and the wind in my area makes for little snow shoveling. Garden is two days of work each season. Fun to do with the kids.
These two words are not included in the article.
I grew up on a ranch-style property with homestead type parents. It was a great experience that involved an endless amount of physical labor.
Some examples; 1. Every morning before school, feeding the horses and in the winter checking their water for ice. 2. Every day after school. Feeding the horses again. 3. Weekly shoveling of horse shit, into a manure spreader. The spreading it in the fields. 4. Lots of work on small engines that break in the winter the Colorado winter in a cold barn. 5. In the fall if we were lucky we would kill an Ekl. This required lots of walking around the mountains off-trail looking for an animal. Once found and killed the grueling work of and caring the meat to a vehicle on a road system. Then hours of butchering. Then more hours of hyde tanning. 6. Winter storms can be powerful enough to rip the tin right off the roof of a hay barn. After the storm, the tins got to be put back on. More hard work. Plowing snow is less physical but still works. 7. Spring is calving season, a calf may be born in the middle of the night. So you may be up all night supporting the birth. Then haft to go to school the next day and try learning while sleep-deprived. 8. Summer is hay season, you might get two crops if you're lucky. There is always stress around the harvest time. It rains in the afternoons in the summer. And wet hay can not be bailed. If it rains after the hay is bailed and before it is bucked into a barn the bails must be dried. I remember being about 8 years old. So small I could not lift a bale. Me and my two brothers were sent into a 300-acre field to rotate hundreds of wet hay bails. So that they would be dry before we loaded them into the truck. It was exhausting. A few years later, when I was strong enough to lift a bail of hay. We would spend a few days lifting bails onto a flatbed trailer and then lift and stacking bails into a hay barn. It is amazing how nice cold glass of water taste after moving hay bails all day. 9. I need to get back to work. So I will end with one last note on the work of homesteading; filling a pantry with canned goods for the winter is another major project which takes hours and hours of work 10. Damn my tech job is so fucking easy compared to the work I did on my parents homestead growing up. 11. Ok, one more: cutting and chopping wood for heating it the winter. We would need between 5 and 7 cords for the house depending on the winter. My Dad found a way to make sure this process was always grueling as I grew up and learned to take on more and more of it. That said, coming home from high school and splinting wood for 20min to keep the house heated for the night was relaxing after a day in class. I guess by the time I was ~15 my body had adjusted to the physical demands of my parent's homestead.
My 2 cents ~ 01