As someone who got a pilot's license because of flight simulator, I'm honestly shocked actually at how much the virtual experience can successfully scratch the itch of the real thing. Sure, there's a thrill that cannot be matched and despite a high-end VR set up at home, the graphics in real life are better, but there's a good amount of the joy I get from the real thing -- the technical challenge, the navigation, the brief escape of being immersed in this activity and not thinking about much else, etc. -- that nowadays you can very faithfully recreate in the sim. And, unlike real life, it is comparably 0 cost activity in terms of setup/price/time.
I love dogs. I don't want a dog (yet, I guess). It's a huge commitment. If I get a chance to periodically interact with a dog - just the good parts, especially, such as petting, playing, running around, etc. - then I'm going to take it. It still doesn't mean I want to adopt a dog.
Apply this to being a farmer, which is a lot of work, and weigh this against the barrier to entry of being a farmer for just a few hours every so often, vs. doing it digitally.
Not only that. The economics side of it. Not everyone could afford a dog. It is quite a bit of money, from the space required for living to the food and medical care.
Also in farming. I do think there are people who like the hard work and simple life. But as a business it is terrible.
$400 a month in food (two large dogs, both turned out to need specialty diets) gets old fast.
That said, I dearly love my dogs and am trying rather hard to not think about the tens of thousands of dollars I will end up spending just on food alone.
As a new dog owner, I'm pretty sure the dog mob could show up to beat me up and steal a kidney and I'd probably still think getting a dog was a great decision. Love is an odd thing.
You just described having grandkids vs having your own kid! A niece/nephew is similar as well. Be the cool aunt/uncle, be the grandparent that feeds the kids sugar just before the parents come to collect them, or any of the other ways of enjoying the time with the kiddos but being able to get back for all the times the kid/sibling was an ass to you!
>If I get a chance to periodically interact with a dog - just the good parts, especially, such as petting, playing, running around, etc. - then I'm going to take it.
I had a couple of dogs who died of old age. I couldn't bring myself to get another dog so instead we dog sit! We use the Rover app and it's been pretty awesome. You get to be a "doggy grandparent" for a couple days, spoil the crap out of them and then poof! They go back to their owners and you don't have to deal with all their BS (because let's be honest: almost every dog his it's own BS)
These games almost never include the really shitty parts, even the "realistic" ones.
Running to the farm & feed store (perhaps an hour round trip, or even more, depending on where you are, and it's getting in the way of getting actual work done) for something or another, mending fences, grading drive-ways and other roads, cleaning yourself and your clothes and boots up after you get covered in mud, cleaning equipment, getting tractors un-stuck, repairing tractors, and so on.
And what they do include is a button press, not a process. Hook up a discer? Back up to it and press the button. No getting out, screwing with chocks and some kind of device or another for raising the tongue into place. No pinching the shit out of your hand because you were careless.
No weed-eating around equipment that's parked outside. No re-painting the barn. No re-sealing some screw holes in the sheet metal roof that've been leaking. No diagnosing and fixing a slipped belt on the combine. No tossing square bales onto a trailer.
No cuts on your arms from corn leaves. No itchiness from handling straw. No hay (ha, ha) fever. No spending an entire morning getting one damn cow or another in the chute for the veterinarian.
These "realistic" simulators still almost always cut out all the worst crap that's the reason people don't have tons and tons of fun doing it in real life. The stuff you do in the game is maybe 5-10% of what you really do.
I think a big part of this is that so many video games are based on violence, without many alternatives. And the ones that are non violent tend to be shorter and more story focused. I think a lot of people want a game that is non-violent, more open world, and has some grind. Farming and survival are two ways to do that, but I think something like a cafe-sim would scratch the same itch for many people.
This is true of a lot of main stream video games, but there's a whole genre of games that are much more wholesome, slice-of-life experiences. Consider: Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, Slime Rancher, and Katamari Damacy—all of which are successful game IP without any of the stereotypical violence we see in AAA shooters.
I've found the "cozy" genre on Steam to also be a great way to find games like these, though I suspect there are other terms that can be used to find them: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Cozy
This is the crux of it for me. Don't get me wrong, I like me a shooter from time to time, but as I've gotten older I find myself not often liking the adrenaline-filled games being pitched.
And Sim-type games really scratch that itch. They often have (relatively) deep gameplay mechanics that are easy to learn but hard to master, don't have a lot of time pressure (many are turn-based, or real-time but with no serious deadlines), and most importantly aren't multiplayer.
Allow me to suggest sable for the category of non-violent open world games. It doesn't really have any grinding but the travel in the game forces a zen-like approach to it all. I kinda wish it didn't have fast travel to be honest.
Obviously because it’s an innate part of our being. It has been with us for thousands of years. If we mostly stopped eating food because of some sort of breakthrough supplementation, we would likely have a food simulator.
> Farm Ownership Loans can be used to purchase or expand a farm or ranch. This loan can help with paying closing costs, constructing or improving buildings on the farm, or to help conserve and protect soil and water resources.
> USDA’s Farm Service Agency offers up to $600,000 for eligible borrowers through Farm Ownership Loans.
> Farm Operating Loans can be used to purchase livestock, seed and equipment. It can also cover farm operating costs and family living expenses while a farm gets up and running.
> USDA’s Farm Service Agency offers up to $400,000 for eligible borrowers through Farm Operating Loans.
Aside from the "grow things" there is an enormous amount of business sense and domain knowledge (what to grow when, how to fix that thing now, does this other thing need fixing?) that is needed to accompany it.
Technically yes, but you can do it on the small (for a hobby farm anyway). You could start a small commercial farm, but you'd basically have bought yourself a sub-minimum wage job.
I live on a horse farm and when we bought the property it didn't really cost that much more than a nice house in the suburbs. My 10 acres and a large new house cost far less than a lot of small houses on tiny lots in places like Seattle or SF. If we had wanted to be farther out (I'm about a 50 minute commute to Minneapolis), we could have gotten more land for even less.
The major adjustments are (a) it's very difficult to take a vacation, (b) the amount of income that goes towards taking care of animals and (c) the work never ends (see [a] above). Besides that, it's all peachy :-)
You could easily raise goats without competing. They dont take up much room and there is a market for them. You just won't make much money. Like farming in general.
The issue is scaling. In order to make enough to live off of the income generated by the goats, you need a dozen goats, which themselves need food, shelter, and medical care. And for dairy goats, you also need the equipment for milking.
A dozen goats is not a lot. Shelter you can build yourself and you just need enough so they have an escape from the sun & snow. Farmers do most of the medical care themselves except for the rare instances where you need to call the vet, e.g., we just had to put a horse down a couple of weeks ago.
Food is the most important one because it's an non-stop expense, but it's not unmanageable since it scales directly with the number of animals.
That roughly agrees with my back of the envelope math. A dozen dairy goats should be able to provide about $80k/year and it doesn't seem like they'd need too much room (my parents house in the country has enough land out back to do this and the neighbors are far enough away to not complain about goats... and, well, the neighbors have cows and so aren't likely to complain in any case - this isn't an option for someone living in the suburbs though).
Still, animal husbandry isn't something for me. It's not the animals, but rather the business side of it that is at issue.
A Nubian goat will apparently produce an average of 2000 pounds per lactation, which averages 284 days. Since gestation averages 149 days, you're getting less than 2000 pounds per year per goat. (https://extension.psu.edu/dairy-goat-production)
2000 pounds per goat is about 250 gallons. A brief search tells me that you might get up to $5/gallon for milk wholesale, which gives you $1259 per goat per annum, or $15000 for a dozen. That's pre-tax, of course, and doesn't include your expenses.
I guess if you sell directly to consumers for $26.66 per gallon, you could gross $80k.
You can produce cheese and such, but that's an additional enterprise. And of course there's potential for income selling goats for meat, since yearly breeding is going to give you a surplus unless you're looking to expand the herd.
From your source, you chose the the one that's near the bottom of the milk production range. If you're trying to make money with a dairy goat, Alpine or Saanen would be better options.
> Productivity: Average 6.6 lb. (3.9 kg) milk per day/1920 lb. (871 kg) over 305 days with 4.8% butterfat and 3.5% protein. ... Although yield is lower than for most dairy breeds, the high levels of milk solids impart a rich flavor and improve coagulation, making it an ideal constituent for making goats’ cheese.
> ... For about a quarter per 8-ounce glass, cow milk offers more nutritional value than just about any other beverage you can buy at this price. Goat milk is nearly five times more expensive, ringing up for $1.24 per 8-ounce glass.
The budget worksheet puts the milk at $6.50/gallon.
My math was based on a that very rough $36/doe/day math without accounting for expenses. I was interested in the "is the herd size a dozen? two dozen? or a hundred? ... in order to live ok?"
The worksheet puts a rough estimate of the total receipts which the worksheet puts at $1,323.10/doe/year.
The returns over variable costs per doe per year is $359.01 and returns to management is $225.72.
> The worksheet puts a rough estimate of the total receipts which the worksheet puts at $1,323.10/doe/year.
So my rough estimate was only about $75 off?
Let's look at that $36/day figure, because I don't trust those blogs.
The PSU page puts the absolute top production for the Saanen at 4870lb per lactation period. Add in the gestation and you're getting 4870 lb per 433 days, or 11.25 lb per day -- 1.4 gallons per day average.
At $12 per gallon, that's $16.8/day per doe, or $6132 per doe per annum, for a grand total of $73k gross receipts per annum on your herd of a dozen.
That's if you can get the top of the market price for the milk, and if all of your goats produce at the absolute top capacity and you get them bred the day after they dry up (but in this case you should probably be breeding your wondergoats for sale, or making money selling semen from the wonderbucks).
It appears so. I am suitably impressed that your envelope has better math than mine did.
One of the parts that the worksheet brings in is all the expenses - both fixed and variable. This is where there is a "yes, you could have a dairy goat heard and make money, but in order to make more money, you need to better vertical integration of the operation" which gets into the growing your own fodder which gets into other economies of scale and ends up looking more like a regular dairy operation growing oats whatever.
The "have a heard of goats, milk them twice a day and live off of that with lots of free time between the milking" isn't something that is easy to do.
Yeah, I'd previously thought about dairy goats and decided there's just too much damn milking. Given some pasture land, I'd choose to raise sheep for meat. It's not a huge amount of income, but it's a lot less work than dairying. Plus you're keeping your own family supplied with lamb--and pork, it's easy to keep a couple hogs around--which is a big savings at the grocery store.
I liked your commentary, it was very insightful. It's important to understand what you are willing to do, as opposed to merely what you like to do.
My wife is a horse trainer and also runs a horse rescue operation. Her average day involves 2-6 hours in the saddle. Now, many horse lovers think that it sounds like so much fun. Like video game testing ("oh, you get to play games all day, that must be great"). But the reality is that it's hard physical work day after day after day correcting the behavior of a powerful animal that is multiples of your bodyweight and doing it under conditions where you could be severely injured.
Back to goats: I think you'll find that most small animal producers are doing it as a side income from something they enjoy. I have a neighbor who has a few dozen goats, but they are also running a commercial trucking company.
A lot of the knowledge required to farm has been lost with big Ag. Try finding someone who actually knows how to do the job's definition. Things like harvesting seeds... Farmers just buy them from the store, and then complain about how farming is getting so expensive. They have become consumers/slaves, with only big Ag, big Oil, and big Pharma as the winners (at the expense of everyone's health and everyone's future).
The phrasing of this places blame on farmers for making a poor choice. Unfortunately to keep up in the market farmers needed to increase yields to remain competitive with their neighbours who embarked with this kind of thing first. It's great to have principals, but it might also bankrupt you.
I don't play Farming Simulator (though an older copy of it is sitting in my steam library)... I do play American Truck Simulator.
For ATS, there's a certain relaxing of "just driving". You've got a goal, and simple, well defined tasks - go here, pick up the load, go there, deliver the load. The 'go there' part is largely an autopilot of a few decades of driving experience with a bit of "ok, this is different" when dealing with something that has a large trailer.
For the most part, its something I can play without needing to do any deeper problem solving. To that end, the game is relaxing.
With the nature of the game, its also something that one can "do" - there are few impossible tasks unlike what one encounters with a day job. The consequences for not completing something is a few points however they are measured - but rarely game ending (and in many cases, that's resolved with a save file).
It is about getting something 'realistic' done in today's world of ever increasing demands.
(very late edit)
My current gaming binge is Hardspace Ship Breaker - which is a game about being a shipbreaker for space ships. Its got the "this can be routine" (though if you mess up the reactor it can get very interesting very fast).
Ship breaking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_breaking ) is in the category of most dangerous jobs and space ships are obviously not realistic. But it's the game that you can just get into the grove and do. One of the best things about the game (for me) is that it is 15 minute shifts. So you can easily say "I'll play this game for 15 minutes on lunch break" and as long as you stick to one shift, that's 15 minutes. The shift ends and its done.
I feel the same about ATS. In fact, I wish it was even more boring, like real driving is. ATS has an unrealistic amount of curves and shortens the distances between cities that in real life would take many hours to travel between.
It also is devoid of any of the (often catastrophic) downsides of making a mistake in real life. Turns out driving can be relaxing and fun if you remove anxiety involving death, injury, and property damage. Perhaps the same applies to farming sims.
> The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in real time at a maximum speed of 45 mph (72 km/h). The feat requires eight hours of continuous play in real time to complete.
> If the player makes it to Las Vegas, one point is scored. The player has the option to make the return trip to Tucson for another point, a decision which must be made in a few seconds or the game ends.
Note that in reality this is probably rather less boring than Desert Bus makes it look because the game deliberately over-simplifies the route. For a start Phoenix is in between Tucson and Las Vegas, but if you head that way you're also going over the Hoover Dam which is a bit more interesting than Desert Bus.
Now, you could head south of Phoenix, and mostly avoid anything interesting, but you still have a few intersections and so on, this is not one endless road into the desert.
Which isn't to say it'd be a compelling experience, even the Hoover Dam route would be extremely boring for most of the duration.
What I can’t believe is that people will fly commercial routes from NY to Australia in real time in MS flight simulator…and that other people set up ATC, and pass the jets from ATC to ATC.
Its obviously not as light on the problem solving, but this is why I keep playing Kerbal Space Program.
I'll admit, I play with the Mechjeb autopilot for doing most maneuvers because they get so repetitive. But it's fun to have an alarm clock full of different missions and switching between the different things you have in progress.
Then I ran out of places to go so I wrote (and eventually handed off) the Kopernicus mod to allow for more planets to be added and the community keeps making more interesting places to go!
One of my favorite things in KSP a while back used to be building whole communications systems to slowly blanket the system with automated rovers and ships. I would program flight computers using mods on them and never actually controlled any of them directly at all. It was pretty easy to program missions where you did standard "take off, go into orbit, transfer to another body, land, detach rover..." etc. I miss that, and perhaps I need to invest in a gaming PC again and sell my console before PS5's are ubiquitous in stores.
Part of the plot background is about unionization.
And you don't need to be blue collar. When I was working tech support, I got in, signed in and that's when I started. At the end of the day, I signed out and that was the end. I worked the "east" shift at SGI in '98. East covered the phones from 5am to 9am with each person taking 2h in that range (mine was 7am to 9am) and then we did callbacks from 9am to 1pm or so (depending on when you started). Central picked up the new calls at 9am and covered the new calls from 9am to 1pm and then west picked up live calls from 1pm to 5pm - I'm not sure how the different teams did their coverage.
Anyways, the thing was at 3pm when I signed out I was done done. I didn't have niggling problems of tech support haunting my mind (compare to being a SDE) or trying to get ahead of the curve of technologies that management will ask about. And the "not worrying about those things" - that was my most productive personal programming time that I've ever had. I have gotten better over the decades at coding - both in the code itself and the use of larger systems... but in terms of quantity and satisfaction of things done, that was the best time.
The only games I want to play nowadays are games that I can relax on, though I'm not really sure what makes a game relaxing. Those games who's primary purpose is to be relaxing look quite boring.
As for driving I been playing dirt rally 2, where I drive at a comfortable pace.
Because with virtual farming you don't have to shovel poop. You can also harvest an entire field with one mouse click. Pretty obvious why few people want to actually become farmers. Despite all the mechanization, it's still difficult, dangerous, and dirty.
Right, because when you fail in a game, you just insert another $.25 and continue. When the crops fail for a real farmer, there is no spawn point to start over. It might literally cost them the farm.
I guess I’m not familiar with this. I live in northern midwestern farm country (corn/soybean fields) and can see some consolidation, but still almost all family farms.
There are no family farms for accounting reasons. The family still lives on the farm and looks like a family farm, but the legal situation is all corporate farm.
I'm not sure what you think you mean by "corporate farm". Pretty much every single business has some corporate structure for tax, liability, etc. purposes.
I'm not even sure it has anything to do with that. Boring & tedious parts exist in many video games.
IMO, It's that you don't need to buy millions in assets using debt to generate a profit at great risk based on many factors that you have no control over.
Have you played farming simulator? I'd rather do real farming, but I don't have the capital to invest in that sort of equipment, so I guess farming simulator it is then.
I read an article a while back that asked a farmer why he works all day and then comes home to play a farming sim. He basically said in the "real world" things constantly go wrong, but in the sim it's much smoother/easier etc. I totally get it.
With so few death cage fighters, why are there so many brawler games? With so few wanting to be soldiers, why are there so many shooters? Pedantic question to pedantic answers.
But my real answer would be that some people are over stimulated at work, and some are over. The understimulated one's I think gravitate to the "grand feats" type of games while those who are overstimulated at work are more looking for either laid back or mundane games to play. All these "_ life sim" games are generally in that mundane category and that's the audience most captive for these forms of entertainment.
Experience the risk without actually taking any risk.
Although, I can offer an anecdote. I really enjoy playing truck simulators, namely American and European Truck Simulator. I had to drive a large box truck recently and I found it super easy - the high up position, looking at the mirrors to back up and parallel park perfectly, and the joy of the open road. Then I realized that truck drivers do this every day for weeks on end as a job. Really appreciate the folks who keep our economy moving.
I think one of the underappreciated issues with the 21st century economy is how many of us do the same thing, day in, day out, hyperoptimized to the point it's economically hard to justify switching tasks. (Or, perhaps more accurately, the 20th century economy, which is still largely with us.)
Do a little of this today, a little of that tomorrow, even a little of this and that within a day, and I feel like we could all tolerate a bit more mundanity (for lack of a better word) in our lives. Cut vegetables, drive a truck, pump sewage, work a factory line, it'd all be easier if we weren't doing the same thing all the time, 40+ hours a week.
That is less so now that factories are more automated. The factory I used to work at (not in, but same building) bragged that within 3 months everyone had done every station once. While a little productivity is lost because of experience, the boredom factor means less people quit and so overall they do better
People are not disposable because they need to be trained. Sure we have books, but everytime you need to look up order in the book a minute is lost compared to someone who knows.
The wrenches don't allow doing steps in the wrong order or wrong torque, but that only gets so far
Actually I never thought of it this way. When I feel very understimulated at work (most of the time) I tend to have a ton of side projects and/or play the action kinda games. Bringing balance to stimulation is definitely an interesting persepecive.
I thought age was a factor. In my youth I had way more patience for the likes of Harvest Moon, and enjoyed the roleplay. However, I didn't know what to expect. I wanted to develop and customize the virtual property, pursue virtual relationships. At a certain point you can't help but see the games for what they are. I quickly grew bored with the repetitive menial tasks. I liked the "idea" of a game like that, but not what it amounted to. Now I can say the same for most jrpgs.
Generally I get what you're saying, but do keep in mind that there are some life sim games that are extremely high on stimulation.
Endless ATC, Firefighting Simulator: The Squad, Transport Inc., Cold Waters, The Invisible Hand, and 112 / 911 operator, and Tin Can come to mind. There's also "study sims" like DCS World which push you really far into the simulation thing, both in requiring a high degree of competence and in the amount of stimulation you have flying a mission.
It can't just be work, given the popularity of video games with kids who don't have jobs yet. I guess you can speculate under or over-stimulation of life in total, but that definitely doesn't comport at least with my personal experience. I played a bunch of sports as a kid and played video games about sports on top of that. When I was a real Soldier in a tank unit, a whole bunch of the tankers played video games involving tank combat. Plenty of infantry played first-person shooters.
Some people just enjoy what they already do and want to do even more of it in a way that doesn't create additional physical hardship and risk.
For me it is because I found no way to own a real farm. I would love to have one, but couldn't figure out how to get one.
Sad part of that is that I have a bunch of relatives that do own farms, but have no interest in farming, the only reason they have those farms is so they can wait the land price to raise before they sell it eventually.
Come to Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, etc and visit a farm. Their reported annual income may be small because of amortization/depreciation, but net worth is very typically several million.
If you’re a poor farmer, you’re not doing it right.
Their net worth doesn't really reflect their income though. Most farms are running on sub 1% profit margins. You dump 5 million dollars on your fields and you would consider $50,000 profit a successful year.
For me, it's Snow Runner. Mud Runner had a more challenging UI. Snow Runner is a bit better. Not perfect, but better.
You have simple tasks and an open world for you to decide how to accomplish the task. There's typically an easy way, which requires more time to complete due to the travel distance involved. And then you can scale all the way up however difficult you want.
And then there's the recovery effort, when your "it didn't look that deep/muddy/steep" plan falls through.
I do like the farming games though. Or at least I did, until I bought 5 acres in the country and got out here. Now if I get the itch for a farming game, I do some kind of project.
Because a lot of people want to buy a farm and grow their own food and cattle, live with nature in nature yada yada. But they realize they either can't afford it or it's too difficult physically. Games offer an alternative. It's not the real deal but the brain makes it sort of real and that's good enough for some. They can live the fantasy without any of the cow dodo
Precisely because so many people would like to farm, small-scale farming is a brutal economic environment. In that respect, it isn't terribly different from academia -- people are doing it for love and the experience, not for money.
Simulating the farming experience without the massive financial risk (and the back-breaking work/unforgiving hours) gives some of that joy without most of the downside.
If you're willing to volunteer to cover night-time calving for cattle in snowstorms in February, you can probably get the real experience for free.
A huge difference between a game and a job is that you can quit the game at any time without consequences. That creates an entirely different state of mind.
I watch a lot of the historical farming series, Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series) And, despite the many different ways people choose to live, there's still this idea that the way we live now is the best way. The title of this is article is a bit strange, but I've noticed in some of the, maybe it's hustle porn communities on Twitter, there's this notion that if you're not automating all of the manual labor in your life you're doing it wrong.
But there's something very nourishing about the idea of living in a world where you're interacting with and directly influencing the physical world around you. Both to care for a plot of land and to make things by hand. I think there's also something nice about living in a small world. No grandiose interconnectedness. You, your family, your community, your livestock and the land around you.
It's so hard to get some of that I think unless you're also willing to completely give up living modern life and move out to the middle of nowhere ala Life Below Zero, or if you're wealthy enough to own land close to town (I'm fortunate enough to have found a nice 2 acres close to town, but it costs a premium compared to other houses the same size). Simulation is a great way to get some of that in small doses.
IMO the big difference is doing it at your leisure and being able to take a break vs. being required to do it 24/7.
When I’m frustrated with my job and modern life in general it’s easy to imagine running away and living on a farm. When I’m sleeping in on a Saturday or taking a spontaneous weekend getaway I’m very glad that I don’t live on a farm.
I mean, you could easily have a farm with enough communal labor that someone could pick up your slack if you took a few days off. Vacation isn't a modern luxury, serf farmers were basically off 50% of the time
I think one reason people like farming games (and games in general really) is that they're fair. You perform a set of actions and get a reward. Sure, some games feel sort of unfair if they're poorly designed. But I think all video games are fair in the sense that they're deterministic. And I know that when I've enjoyed playing farming games, I enjoy the sense of growth that I know is guaranteed to those that learn the rules. Real life is not the same. You can follow all the rules, play fair, and still lose.
Transforming a piece of land and raising animals is fun and rewarding, hence why people garden and have pets. Unfortunately modern farming requires you to sacrifice the aesthetic and humane in order to be profitable unless you can build a dedicated clientele of people willing to pay a 400% markup for your food, or your farm's actual business is agro-tourism/goat yoga/etc.
Organic agriculture/horticulture on a scale large enough to survive is definitely possible and best practices are usually well-documented by your state’s extension.
Conventional, factory farming is “easier” and more widespread, so there is more comfort in numbers doing that.
Besides "Americas army" there really arent any video games with an intention of bringing you to the profession. It's really just about having fun. I do recall a US general talking about how this doesn't work and the overweight/obesity epidemic amongst gamers is a huge impediment to enrollment. Video games aside.
Really the question, why so few farmers?
Government education has specifically trained and discouraged people from becoming farmers, intentionally reducing the number of farmers.
Biosciences has made farming quite unprofitable. The use of fertilizers, gmos, pesticides, etc have made a small time farmer basically unprofitable compared to the farmer with 80,000 acres and large machines.
There are better professions to earn a living. Hell, the cost of startup is ridiculous. ~86 acres near where i live is $5 million.
You also cant really live near cities. There's no rockstars coming to rural canada. You have to live in toronto to get those rockstars. Good internet is also not in rural areas.
But then you also have governments actively taxing farmers to tremendous degree. For example, Carbon taxes disproportionately impact a farmer's old diesel in his massive tractor compared to a econobox tiny car. Farmers obviously don't care. A wide carbon tax like that ends up in the consumer's hands as food inflation.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadApply this to being a farmer, which is a lot of work, and weigh this against the barrier to entry of being a farmer for just a few hours every so often, vs. doing it digitally.
Also in farming. I do think there are people who like the hard work and simple life. But as a business it is terrible.
That said, I dearly love my dogs and am trying rather hard to not think about the tens of thousands of dollars I will end up spending just on food alone.
I had a couple of dogs who died of old age. I couldn't bring myself to get another dog so instead we dog sit! We use the Rover app and it's been pretty awesome. You get to be a "doggy grandparent" for a couple days, spoil the crap out of them and then poof! They go back to their owners and you don't have to deal with all their BS (because let's be honest: almost every dog his it's own BS)
Running to the farm & feed store (perhaps an hour round trip, or even more, depending on where you are, and it's getting in the way of getting actual work done) for something or another, mending fences, grading drive-ways and other roads, cleaning yourself and your clothes and boots up after you get covered in mud, cleaning equipment, getting tractors un-stuck, repairing tractors, and so on.
And what they do include is a button press, not a process. Hook up a discer? Back up to it and press the button. No getting out, screwing with chocks and some kind of device or another for raising the tongue into place. No pinching the shit out of your hand because you were careless.
No weed-eating around equipment that's parked outside. No re-painting the barn. No re-sealing some screw holes in the sheet metal roof that've been leaking. No diagnosing and fixing a slipped belt on the combine. No tossing square bales onto a trailer.
No cuts on your arms from corn leaves. No itchiness from handling straw. No hay (ha, ha) fever. No spending an entire morning getting one damn cow or another in the chute for the veterinarian.
These "realistic" simulators still almost always cut out all the worst crap that's the reason people don't have tons and tons of fun doing it in real life. The stuff you do in the game is maybe 5-10% of what you really do.
I've found the "cozy" genre on Steam to also be a great way to find games like these, though I suspect there are other terms that can be used to find them: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Cozy
And Sim-type games really scratch that itch. They often have (relatively) deep gameplay mechanics that are easy to learn but hard to master, don't have a lot of time pressure (many are turn-based, or real-time but with no serious deadlines), and most importantly aren't multiplayer.
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/farm-loan-pro... and https://www.farmers.gov/loans
> Farm Ownership Loans can be used to purchase or expand a farm or ranch. This loan can help with paying closing costs, constructing or improving buildings on the farm, or to help conserve and protect soil and water resources.
> USDA’s Farm Service Agency offers up to $600,000 for eligible borrowers through Farm Ownership Loans.
> Farm Operating Loans can be used to purchase livestock, seed and equipment. It can also cover farm operating costs and family living expenses while a farm gets up and running.
> USDA’s Farm Service Agency offers up to $400,000 for eligible borrowers through Farm Operating Loans.
Aside from the "grow things" there is an enormous amount of business sense and domain knowledge (what to grow when, how to fix that thing now, does this other thing need fixing?) that is needed to accompany it.
I live on a horse farm and when we bought the property it didn't really cost that much more than a nice house in the suburbs. My 10 acres and a large new house cost far less than a lot of small houses on tiny lots in places like Seattle or SF. If we had wanted to be farther out (I'm about a 50 minute commute to Minneapolis), we could have gotten more land for even less.
The major adjustments are (a) it's very difficult to take a vacation, (b) the amount of income that goes towards taking care of animals and (c) the work never ends (see [a] above). Besides that, it's all peachy :-)
The issue is scaling. In order to make enough to live off of the income generated by the goats, you need a dozen goats, which themselves need food, shelter, and medical care. And for dairy goats, you also need the equipment for milking.
Food is the most important one because it's an non-stop expense, but it's not unmanageable since it scales directly with the number of animals.
Still, animal husbandry isn't something for me. It's not the animals, but rather the business side of it that is at issue.
http://www.cs.uni.edu/%7Ewallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541 (and my commentary on it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26215448 )
A Nubian goat will apparently produce an average of 2000 pounds per lactation, which averages 284 days. Since gestation averages 149 days, you're getting less than 2000 pounds per year per goat. (https://extension.psu.edu/dairy-goat-production)
2000 pounds per goat is about 250 gallons. A brief search tells me that you might get up to $5/gallon for milk wholesale, which gives you $1259 per goat per annum, or $15000 for a dozen. That's pre-tax, of course, and doesn't include your expenses.
I guess if you sell directly to consumers for $26.66 per gallon, you could gross $80k.
You can produce cheese and such, but that's an additional enterprise. And of course there's potential for income selling goats for meat, since yearly breeding is going to give you a surplus unless you're looking to expand the herd.
---
https://www.thehappychickencoop.com/how-to-make-money-raisin...
> A goat farmer can earn $8 to $12 per gallon. The most profitable dairy goat breed is the Saanen, in which you can profit up to $36 per day.
From https://backyardgoats.iamcountryside.com/goat-breeds/nubian-...
> Productivity: Average 6.6 lb. (3.9 kg) milk per day/1920 lb. (871 kg) over 305 days with 4.8% butterfat and 3.5% protein. ... Although yield is lower than for most dairy breeds, the high levels of milk solids impart a rich flavor and improve coagulation, making it an ideal constituent for making goats’ cheese.
Compare with https://backyardgoats.iamcountryside.com/goat-breeds/saanen-...
(digging) - this gets to https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/640/3/0... - the saanen appears to be about 15% - 30% more milk in the same time frame depending on the source.
The "sample dairy goat budget" on the page you provided is an interesting resource.
The price for goat milk - https://milklife.com/articles/nutrition/differences-between-...
> ... For about a quarter per 8-ounce glass, cow milk offers more nutritional value than just about any other beverage you can buy at this price. Goat milk is nearly five times more expensive, ringing up for $1.24 per 8-ounce glass.
The budget worksheet puts the milk at $6.50/gallon.
My math was based on a that very rough $36/doe/day math without accounting for expenses. I was interested in the "is the herd size a dozen? two dozen? or a hundred? ... in order to live ok?"
The worksheet puts a rough estimate of the total receipts which the worksheet puts at $1,323.10/doe/year.
The returns over variable costs per doe per year is $359.01 and returns to management is $225.72.
So my rough estimate was only about $75 off?
Let's look at that $36/day figure, because I don't trust those blogs.
The PSU page puts the absolute top production for the Saanen at 4870lb per lactation period. Add in the gestation and you're getting 4870 lb per 433 days, or 11.25 lb per day -- 1.4 gallons per day average.
At $12 per gallon, that's $16.8/day per doe, or $6132 per doe per annum, for a grand total of $73k gross receipts per annum on your herd of a dozen.
That's if you can get the top of the market price for the milk, and if all of your goats produce at the absolute top capacity and you get them bred the day after they dry up (but in this case you should probably be breeding your wondergoats for sale, or making money selling semen from the wonderbucks).
One of the parts that the worksheet brings in is all the expenses - both fixed and variable. This is where there is a "yes, you could have a dairy goat heard and make money, but in order to make more money, you need to better vertical integration of the operation" which gets into the growing your own fodder which gets into other economies of scale and ends up looking more like a regular dairy operation growing oats whatever.
The "have a heard of goats, milk them twice a day and live off of that with lots of free time between the milking" isn't something that is easy to do.
My wife is a horse trainer and also runs a horse rescue operation. Her average day involves 2-6 hours in the saddle. Now, many horse lovers think that it sounds like so much fun. Like video game testing ("oh, you get to play games all day, that must be great"). But the reality is that it's hard physical work day after day after day correcting the behavior of a powerful animal that is multiples of your bodyweight and doing it under conditions where you could be severely injured.
Back to goats: I think you'll find that most small animal producers are doing it as a side income from something they enjoy. I have a neighbor who has a few dozen goats, but they are also running a commercial trucking company.
For ATS, there's a certain relaxing of "just driving". You've got a goal, and simple, well defined tasks - go here, pick up the load, go there, deliver the load. The 'go there' part is largely an autopilot of a few decades of driving experience with a bit of "ok, this is different" when dealing with something that has a large trailer.
For the most part, its something I can play without needing to do any deeper problem solving. To that end, the game is relaxing.
With the nature of the game, its also something that one can "do" - there are few impossible tasks unlike what one encounters with a day job. The consequences for not completing something is a few points however they are measured - but rarely game ending (and in many cases, that's resolved with a save file).
It is about getting something 'realistic' done in today's world of ever increasing demands.
(very late edit)
My current gaming binge is Hardspace Ship Breaker - which is a game about being a shipbreaker for space ships. Its got the "this can be routine" (though if you mess up the reactor it can get very interesting very fast).
Ship breaking ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_breaking ) is in the category of most dangerous jobs and space ships are obviously not realistic. But it's the game that you can just get into the grove and do. One of the best things about the game (for me) is that it is 15 minute shifts. So you can easily say "I'll play this game for 15 minutes on lunch break" and as long as you stick to one shift, that's 15 minutes. The shift ends and its done.
It also is devoid of any of the (often catastrophic) downsides of making a mistake in real life. Turns out driving can be relaxing and fun if you remove anxiety involving death, injury, and property damage. Perhaps the same applies to farming sims.
> The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in real time at a maximum speed of 45 mph (72 km/h). The feat requires eight hours of continuous play in real time to complete.
> If the player makes it to Las Vegas, one point is scored. The player has the option to make the return trip to Tucson for another point, a decision which must be made in a few seconds or the game ends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller%27s_Smoke_and_...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1017180/The_Long_Drive/
A realistic driving simulator from Omaha to Cheyenne would be pretty boring, I'll give you that.
Now, you could head south of Phoenix, and mostly avoid anything interesting, but you still have a few intersections and so on, this is not one endless road into the desert.
Which isn't to say it'd be a compelling experience, even the Hoover Dam route would be extremely boring for most of the duration.
I'll admit, I play with the Mechjeb autopilot for doing most maneuvers because they get so repetitive. But it's fun to have an alarm clock full of different missions and switching between the different things you have in progress.
Then I ran out of places to go so I wrote (and eventually handed off) the Kopernicus mod to allow for more planets to be added and the community keeps making more interesting places to go!
The main good feature of blue-collar work.
And you don't need to be blue collar. When I was working tech support, I got in, signed in and that's when I started. At the end of the day, I signed out and that was the end. I worked the "east" shift at SGI in '98. East covered the phones from 5am to 9am with each person taking 2h in that range (mine was 7am to 9am) and then we did callbacks from 9am to 1pm or so (depending on when you started). Central picked up the new calls at 9am and covered the new calls from 9am to 1pm and then west picked up live calls from 1pm to 5pm - I'm not sure how the different teams did their coverage.
Anyways, the thing was at 3pm when I signed out I was done done. I didn't have niggling problems of tech support haunting my mind (compare to being a SDE) or trying to get ahead of the curve of technologies that management will ask about. And the "not worrying about those things" - that was my most productive personal programming time that I've ever had. I have gotten better over the decades at coding - both in the code itself and the use of larger systems... but in terms of quantity and satisfaction of things done, that was the best time.
As for driving I been playing dirt rally 2, where I drive at a comfortable pace.
In the US, subsidized crop insurance lowers the risk of low yields and provides a nice safety net.
IMO, It's that you don't need to buy millions in assets using debt to generate a profit at great risk based on many factors that you have no control over.
But my real answer would be that some people are over stimulated at work, and some are over. The understimulated one's I think gravitate to the "grand feats" type of games while those who are overstimulated at work are more looking for either laid back or mundane games to play. All these "_ life sim" games are generally in that mundane category and that's the audience most captive for these forms of entertainment.
Although, I can offer an anecdote. I really enjoy playing truck simulators, namely American and European Truck Simulator. I had to drive a large box truck recently and I found it super easy - the high up position, looking at the mirrors to back up and parallel park perfectly, and the joy of the open road. Then I realized that truck drivers do this every day for weeks on end as a job. Really appreciate the folks who keep our economy moving.
Do a little of this today, a little of that tomorrow, even a little of this and that within a day, and I feel like we could all tolerate a bit more mundanity (for lack of a better word) in our lives. Cut vegetables, drive a truck, pump sewage, work a factory line, it'd all be easier if we weren't doing the same thing all the time, 40+ hours a week.
I vaguely remember some factories would not let workers change jobs once they got good at them, to their detriment (with carpal tunnel and other RSIs)
The wrenches don't allow doing steps in the wrong order or wrong torque, but that only gets so far
Endless ATC, Firefighting Simulator: The Squad, Transport Inc., Cold Waters, The Invisible Hand, and 112 / 911 operator, and Tin Can come to mind. There's also "study sims" like DCS World which push you really far into the simulation thing, both in requiring a high degree of competence and in the amount of stimulation you have flying a mission.
Some people just enjoy what they already do and want to do even more of it in a way that doesn't create additional physical hardship and risk.
Sad part of that is that I have a bunch of relatives that do own farms, but have no interest in farming, the only reason they have those farms is so they can wait the land price to raise before they sell it eventually.
Come to Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, etc and visit a farm. Their reported annual income may be small because of amortization/depreciation, but net worth is very typically several million.
If you’re a poor farmer, you’re not doing it right.
And yes, I'm from Iowa.
Additionally, you're completely ignoring appreciation and paying down the loan. Farmland has went from ~2k /acre to 12k in about 20 years.
"With so few alien invaders, why are video games about invading aliens so popular?"
"With so few NFL teams, why are video games about managing NFL teams so popular?"
* https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/09/16/farm-minimizat...
You have simple tasks and an open world for you to decide how to accomplish the task. There's typically an easy way, which requires more time to complete due to the travel distance involved. And then you can scale all the way up however difficult you want.
And then there's the recovery effort, when your "it didn't look that deep/muddy/steep" plan falls through.
I do like the farming games though. Or at least I did, until I bought 5 acres in the country and got out here. Now if I get the itch for a farming game, I do some kind of project.
Simulating the farming experience without the massive financial risk (and the back-breaking work/unforgiving hours) gives some of that joy without most of the downside.
If you're willing to volunteer to cover night-time calving for cattle in snowstorms in February, you can probably get the real experience for free.
But there's something very nourishing about the idea of living in a world where you're interacting with and directly influencing the physical world around you. Both to care for a plot of land and to make things by hand. I think there's also something nice about living in a small world. No grandiose interconnectedness. You, your family, your community, your livestock and the land around you.
It's so hard to get some of that I think unless you're also willing to completely give up living modern life and move out to the middle of nowhere ala Life Below Zero, or if you're wealthy enough to own land close to town (I'm fortunate enough to have found a nice 2 acres close to town, but it costs a premium compared to other houses the same size). Simulation is a great way to get some of that in small doses.
When I’m frustrated with my job and modern life in general it’s easy to imagine running away and living on a farm. When I’m sleeping in on a Saturday or taking a spontaneous weekend getaway I’m very glad that I don’t live on a farm.
Organic agriculture/horticulture on a scale large enough to survive is definitely possible and best practices are usually well-documented by your state’s extension.
Conventional, factory farming is “easier” and more widespread, so there is more comfort in numbers doing that.
Really the question, why so few farmers?
Government education has specifically trained and discouraged people from becoming farmers, intentionally reducing the number of farmers.
Biosciences has made farming quite unprofitable. The use of fertilizers, gmos, pesticides, etc have made a small time farmer basically unprofitable compared to the farmer with 80,000 acres and large machines.
There are better professions to earn a living. Hell, the cost of startup is ridiculous. ~86 acres near where i live is $5 million.
You also cant really live near cities. There's no rockstars coming to rural canada. You have to live in toronto to get those rockstars. Good internet is also not in rural areas.
But then you also have governments actively taxing farmers to tremendous degree. For example, Carbon taxes disproportionately impact a farmer's old diesel in his massive tractor compared to a econobox tiny car. Farmers obviously don't care. A wide carbon tax like that ends up in the consumer's hands as food inflation.
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/food-inflation
Basically nobody has normal/low food inflation because of this.
Then you have the 'fertilizer reductions'... https://wheatgrowers.ca/advocacy-resources/fertilizer-reduct...
IF you work in an industry where the government is actively screwing you over so much. You choose a new profession right away. Hence no farmers.