even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

Mr. Krauss-Malett said he became interested in farming after working in a restaurant and seeing how much food was wasted. Mr. Bobman had the same realization working in the produce section at a grocery store before college.

'people waste so much food! i think i'd like to grow that food that they waste!'

Sure, and I had a number of college friends who did this (state school, btw, not expensive private quid u.). The ones that survived were the ones who actually came from my U's ag school and were very serious and knowledgeable about agriculture, although even some of those left the field, as it were.

what's your field? that one over yonder!

i think its great because it means these people are too tired at night to start indie rock bands.

oh i think they have their hootenannies

they do tend to take up ukelele

I had a bunch of ag school housemates, in fact. Some of them took a course called "Meats" in which there was a lesson on "Hog Killin'". I didn't even realize at the time how proto-Brooklyn all of this was.

the only thing that gets between a man and his washboard is his spoon

Alternately, the only thing that gets between a man and his Spoon is his washboard.

leave it to the quid ag thread to get me to continuously watch youtubes of people playing washboards

tumblr

http://images.canadianlisted.com/nlarge/antique-t-eaton-monarch-hand-crank-wringer-washing-machine_4732761.jpg

i did work on a farm once, for two days or so. it kind of sucked.

^ history of human civilization in one sentence

Yeah, picking veggies for a couple hours is nice. Cleaning caked sheep manure off the bottom of a pen for a couple of hours is not. And doing these and many other things from sunup to sundown every day is most definitely not.

but, it always looks so picturesque from a distance!

http://www.maggiore.net/greenacres/images/ztheme7.jpg

I aint gonna work on maggies farm no more

I like the idea that there are an increasing number of farms, I get sad when I hear old farmers talking about how they have no-one to give their farms to when they die etc.

But at the same time unless you're a dedicated aggie and not just a hippy who hates seeing beet tops in the trash, the burnout rate has gotta be pretty high over a 5 yr span, surely. I mean, those are looooong days. And it's constant work, it's not like once everything's planted you can kick back and watch the money roll in.

well that's why we give those jobs to illegal immigrants

I grew up on a farm and spent a lot of my teenage summers working on farms. It is hard and repetitive work and I can't imagine that most of the people doing this have much of an idea of what they're getting into. Aspiring to work on a farm seems almost akin to aspiring to be a factory worker to me.

that too

I was watching a Bourdain No Reservations where he was hanging out on some farm and said to the farmer about why he does it, and that there has to be some element of romanticism, surely

and I was like WTF, only ppl who don't grow up around farms say shit like that

well the smell of cow urine definitely affects your thought processes but romanticism, loooooool gtfo

what did the farmer say back to him?

I can't remember but there was definitely an edit where they took out the long pause of confused silence. it was an old Australian farmer, which made it funnier to me

I grew up on farms and worked in hog/turkey/chicken houses. Not fun. Not for a second.

Yeah I was a town kid but all my friends were farm kids, so whenever I slept over at a friends house the parents would be all 'great, extra pair of hands', lol

"i love the smell of cow shit in the morning"

This used to be called "back to the land," and most of it didn't last. I hung out on a farm of a sort of "last man standing" of that generation in New Hampshire, and he was pretty cool but kind of grizzled from the whole experience. He also had to do a mix of vegetable farming, maple syrup farming and occasional lumber selling to make ends meet. And one of his two kids was pretty non-keen on the lifestyle and had posters of pop icons all over her bedroom and envied the suburban kids at her regional school.

I guess maybe now there's potentially more money in the kind of boutique, high-end farming? Although I don't know if that's even true, and it's probably a tough business to establish oneself in.

artisanal vegetables

It may have changed but my impression is that unless you live in a cool area where you can sell your goods directly or to people who will pay a decent amount for what you're growing/raising, so much of farming is selling to larger corporations because they're the only ones who buy, and they are pretty much out to keep you poor. The only rich farmers I knew growing up were the ones who came from money and never actually worked their own farms.

oh, you mean heirloom vegetables xp

artisanal = avoiding the crude and artless things that farmers do to actually make ends meet = how to makes a small fortune is start with a large one.

no he means handcrafted tomatoes

i find it weird that vanity farming hasn't been turned into a turnkey operation with an army of roomba robots doing your bidding.

haybaling app

there are lots of small boutique-y farms that sell directly to fancy restaurants or fancy wholesalers and who make good money doing it. and a lot of them are run by old educated ex-hippies. the guys who went back to the land and decided not to leave the land and go to law school.

the guys who get laughed at by regular farmers but who make good money selling fancy potatoes to french restaurants. i thought it was funny that lorrie moore wrote about one of these guys in her last novel cuz i knew people like that when i lived and worked in philly. philosophy-major old dudes who had the most killer onions you've ever seen in your life.

It may have changed but my impression is that unless you live in a cool area where you can sell your goods directly or to people who will pay a decent amount for what you're growing/raising, so much of farming is selling to larger corporations because they're the only ones who buy, and they are pretty much out to keep you poor. The only rich farmers I knew growing up were the ones who came from money and never actually worked their own farms.

I read an article once that detailed how farmers get fucked in this system, particularly in dealing with Wal-Mart, who'll just refuse to pay for a shipment if they leave it sitting and anything goes bad.

after a semi-dumb facebook argument, I realized that the article is kind of conflating three things (1) people who just wanna do a farm internship after college for an "experience, (2) romantic types who think they can be farmers, and (3) people who actually go to agricultural colleges to study farming (I'm guessing that's what the colorado state tractor guy is). People in category 1 don't intend to be serious about it in most cases, people in category 2 do and mostly fail (but occasionally succeed), and people in category 3 are mostly serious about it and are much more likely to succeed.

I'm rooting for category 3. go Aggies!

I'm starting 'farm for america'

let me guess - no tractors though

:)

Solar powered tractors! (cue Jackson Browne)

More 'Booming' LOLs but

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/booming/25match-booming.html

http://theamericanscholar.org/numbers-game/

think he just touched the third rail there

man let me at the posts from that weekly blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/realestate/how-do-you-get-a-key-to-gramercy-park.html?hp

had no idea there was an entire series

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/timestopics/series/booming/index.html

ugh, old people

Reading through the list of articles reminds me of an email my wife got from my mom yesterday. Apparently my mom was reading reviews of some random book on Amazon and came across a review written by someone in Austin (where I live), so she wanted to know if my wife wrote the review or if not, did we happen to know the person who did.

So anyway, that's what boomers are like.