Some things I remember:
* Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields
* Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields
* Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our village during harvest
* The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again and it's very comforting.
Now I work in high tech, working on AI, and the fancy stuff. There is just something about rice fields that I love - maybe just memories, childhood, smell, how serene it looks when it's full.
My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable more people in cities to migrate back to rural places. When I was younger, I used envy those who grew up privileged in a big modern city. Nowadays, I absolutely am glad I grew up in a little village in a farming community and I consider myself lucky to have.
Dad was a teacher in a rural school, mum stayed at home.
Until I went to school I would stay outside all day with my friends, playing in and around the rivers and dams, making our own fun with abandoned cars and rusted out farming equipment.
Our school had one computer, and I was lucky enough to get to use it after hours from time to time.
I would study the manual from front to back so I could optimise my time while on the computer.
Practiced typing on a typewriter to type in code listings faster later (aging myself here ;)
Today I build AI agents and infrastructure to run them for a hyperscaler, and my car drives me around. Feels like another lifetime ago.
I'd like my small son to have the same opportunities that I had, instead of a school where the playground has lots of very carefully manufactured play equipment and they get to sit and look at iPads instead of working out for themselves how to program a BBC Micro.
I am always skeptical of urban people wanting to move back to little villages to do farming. Farming is a back-breaking and a tough job. You are exposed to all the vagaries of nature. The market forces are also not always in your favour. It is another version of "quit-job-and-open-a-coffee-shop" fallacy.
That can't really be said for downscaling rice farmers, can it? I mean, at best maybe the other rice farmers enjoy having them around.
And I think when most people speak of the dream of returning to rural society to e.g. farm, they're speaking very much of the former rather than the latter.
The single biggest reason these farms exist is because American retail produce is mostly garbage. It’s so economically micro-optimized that all flavour has been wrung out of it. The only way many of us immigrants can get back the flavors of our childhoods is by growing the fruits and vegetables ourselves, if only to have control over the varieties, the vast majority of which are not sold in stores (>95%). That nostalgia is what pays the margin.
BTW you do NOT want ten acres. That is a back breaking amount of work and even with modern technology you'll struggle to cope (it's not enough to afford most heavy equipment, but too much to do manually). You want an acre or two where you have enough space to plant trees. It takes a few years from nursery to fruiting, but they are far lower maintenance.
The smell of paddy (and also of large quantity of cooked rice) is absolutely soothing for me and it brings back memory.
During my grandfather time, it was very common for a crab to grab your fingers when you are planting the paddy. My father would chase turtles and large frogs when he was a kid.
When I was a kid, the crabs and turtles were gone but frogs were pretty abundant. In last twenty years, there are hardly any frogs left. Earthworms are also under stress.
The Japanese style of planting paddy wasn't very common in India before green revolution. Then we had a some new varieties that took over almost all old varieties for a simple reason for yield. My grandmother used to complain about a lost variety a lot. Apparently it had such a strong aroma that whole village would know what rice you have cooked. Glad to see more efforts preserving old varieties [1].
These genotypes are being lost to industrial mono-cropping. The government is doing nothing about it.
This is happening worldwide and is one of the tragedies of modernity. Mexico for instance has tons of regional varieties of peppers that don't grow anywhere else except for in a very specific micro climate and they're disappearing in large part because of cheap imports that makes farming them unprofitable.
Ah, the perennial dream of the technologist. Here's a Le Corbusier quote on the same theme from 100 years ago
> The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.
If there is a hell, Le Corbusier is currently in it, eating the equivalent in cement to all the monstrosities he concocted.
Except this time, the dream is actually real and cheaper than ever thanks to small EVs, batteries and solar power. 100 years ago it was limited to people with large estates who owned cars (and probably needed secretaries for their work).
These days it's more affordable than ever (except land/housing)
Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes.
The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infrastructure, which cuts off wildlife routes and natural drainage, and even with EVs, still pollutes the air from tire wear.
Everyone wants a huge house with lots of land far from neighbors.
But then they want the state of the art hospital to be close. They want to be able yo reach the closest airport in max 1 hour. They want their kids to play with other kids, ideally without being chauffeured around endlessly, etc, etc.
What I've discovered is that humanity has mastered the ancestral art of "having the cake and eating it, too", also called delusion and/or hypocrisy :-)
We're humans. We do that stuff.
And we're natural creatures like the rest of them are.
Some human activities can have an outsized impact, but the overwhelming majority of those activities remain necessary regardless of where people live, and some will have an greater impact with widespread urbanity since some things like energy/food/water can be relatively cleanly decentralized in rural settings, at least partially, but require complete centralization in urban settings.
The land that people live on, whether it's in a city, a suburb, or in a rural manner is a rounding error compared to those demands.
That's the actual tragedy. Forests contain a lot more like per cubic km than pastures do.
Where's the food going to come from?
It's common enough, here at least, to have a small family cropping 13,000 old school acres - tilling, seeding, waiting, harvesting, etc with big machines and Ag-bots.
You're going to need more farms and more farmers, and no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.
I'm just here to point out farming and livestock at suprisng to many scales can be operated by fewer people than you might expect.
as for: > no-one can afford to be shipping food halfway round the planet.
what does the Atlas of Economic Complexity type datasets currently say about food volume tonnages and trip lengths? I know that our local farmers co-op
handles handysize to post-Panamax vessel shipments from Australia, United States, Canada, South America and Europe to key grain markets in Asia, Europe, Central America and the Middle East.
and there are other grain basins about the globe.
The challenges for grain shipping going forward likely fall about getting sufficient production of non fossil origin methanol fuel variations for shipping engines.
That and making sure the front doesn't fall off.
Urbanisation ratios have increased, farm worker percentages decreased, average land area holdings increased so stores, schools, etc. are closing.
As time passes now, more an more old farm hoses are vacant island in an ocean of larger consolidated workings.
https://www.wpr.org/news/locally-grown-fruits-veggies-expens...
We do not have the capacity to ship food halfway round the world because picky eaters don't like the idea of eating meat and potatoes.
Depends on the food, if you're clearing land for a new crop (which many countries have done historically and still do today) then it's not sustainable. And if the native crops are simply not as good nutritionally as the new crop then it's better to eat the new crop even at the ecological cost of the native one, e.g. potatoes vs barley in Ireland.
I'm not sure what you're referring to in your second sentence, not sure why picky eaters wouldn't like meat and potatoes or what that has to do with shipping in general, not even the fact that we do indeed have the capacity and will to ship food halfway around the world already today.
Musk wants to be a founding father. And just as the OG founding fathers, his problem isn't necessarily with the centralization part in general, but with the centralizing being done by others. There's a reason the original American voters were all white land owning men (and in some cases, slave owning men!).
I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but magical for me.
Then we moved to the middle of a European capital city (Sofia) and I _still_ had almost a forest right next to the apartment block we used to live in - enough of a forest that as a 10yo kid I could find a nook to build myself a small hut with a burning fireplace inside it and nobody complained.
There are plenty of big European cities that are 10-20mins short unsupervised trip to a wilderness that a kid can do.
For example - Valencia has an uninterrupted bicycle highway that gets you from the city center to a wilderness preserve and a beach in less than an hour cycling.
To me all of these nature vs city laments are just US car dependency. Cities don’t have to be this way at all.
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/2de...
(In my previous post, I forgot to mention stunning rainforests near Sintra in Portugal.)
https://gist.github.com/olalonde/8a905bcd87e3bfcd4f6143a337e...
I can tell by the houses in your wife's village that their area was likely wealthier than ours growing up. Our houses looked more like this: https://imgur.com/a/Pc9LuKF
When I was a kid, it felt like there were only 2 or 3 villages total in my area since our parents didn't allow us to go too far. As a visiting adult, I found out that there were hundreds of similar villages in the region. Most of these villages are generally empty nowadays as people moved to cities. However, I heard from locals that some younger people are beginning to return to villages and raise their kids there.
I believe it's pretty quiet here too outside of CNY, although there is at least one active school nearby. Nice to hear some younger people are returning. It must be nice for kids to grow up in this kind of environment.
Our village didn't get electricity until the 90s, I think. I do remember having electricity growing up, and even a small TV. By the time I emigrated, some households had refrigerators.
It allows for supremely-intense end-game levels of automation, and also for personal productivity and a resulting increased joy, and for at least some aspects of free market economics to all work together.
(Can it happen? Perhaps we'll find out.)
It's a very unique and fulfilling experience to be one with the nature. You get to learn that chickens eat almost anything. There's definitely a sense of belonging in nature that I miss
Why? Honest question.
A kid in a town/city has access to a billion opportunities many of which exist only because there are enough people interested.
Why? Honest question.
In a village, everyone knows everyone. Kids play with each other and run around freely. Every house protects all the kids and help each other. Everyone trusts everyone. You never feel lonely. Life is slower, much less stressful.
I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society. This just didn't happen when I was growing up in a village. There is a joke that Asian parents don't think depression exists. I think part of that mindset is rooted in how many of them grew up - depression was just not really a thing in a village.
I sometimes hear of people who try to move to the country side, only to hate it and want to move back to cities. I get it. It's not for everyone. But I think it can be aided with technology such as AI+robots helping with your farms or house work, self driving cars taking your kids to school a bit far away, AI doctors who can do most of the basic healthcare work, etc. And if you can build a business with 1 or 2 people + AI, then it also makes remote work more viable. Basically, I think tech can bring a lot of the city quality of life to the country side.
If kids want to move to a town/city for more opportunities or networking, they'd be free to do so when they're older. Most do. But right now, the cities seem like the only path to having a decent quality of life.
That is said almost verbatim by every adult in the US, including the ones who grew up in cities.
That just means we need to structure cities differently.
I live in a 1 sq km neighbourhood (literally, 1 km square) that houses 10k people.
It has almost everything I could wish for at walkable distance, schools for all ages, parks, a gym, a pool, sports campgrounds, medics, pharmacies, stores, markets, etc.
What doesn't exist (e.g. a movie theater, a library) I can reach by public transit in half an hour. The city has 2M people, there's plenty of stuff to do.
I've lived here all my life, my kids go to school with the kids of my school mates. They walk to school from at least 10yo, they visit each other's houses. During school breaks and weekends, they play in the park with their school friends while their parents grab a beer in a nearby kiosk.
You can build communities like this within cities.
In Japan that's true in a lot of city neighbourhoods as well. The high trust is extremely valuable but villages are not the only way to achieve it.
> I feel sorry when I see kids today depressed, lonely, and distrusts society.
The weird thing is, rural people show a lot of distrust and fear that city people seem to show less. Rural people just assume that city means danger and fear.
> depression was just not really a thing in a village.
This is simply not true. If you look at social issues like alcoholism, drug use, suicides or domestic violence ... villages have plenty of those. They have harder availability of psychologists and psychiatrists. That does not mean issues do not exist there, they measurably do.
City kids have friends, play outside and go visit friends.
I think it's the degree that matters.
This is simply not true. If you look at social issues like alcoholism, drug use, suicides or domestic violence ... villages have plenty of those.
City kids do not have less friends then rural kids. They do not socialize less. And if their super local turns up mistreating them, they have actual option to go elsewhere.
> Degree matters here too.
Yes. Small villages have more of these. The rural culture of alcoholism and domestic violence acceptance is both something very real and traditional. What are we talking about here, seriously. You frequently had to drink with others, else you was an outsider. And if family situation turned out bad, you have literally no where to go. (It is not like it would be easy in the city. But you have to from village to city to maybe get help.)
Seems like a recipe for rampant child abuse.
Most of those opportunities involve getting hit by a car.
I did and am moving back to the village now.
It makes a pretty big difference. Yes, the opportunities in the city are bigger for everything, but so are the dangers. The amount of crazy people. The effort involved in getting to a nice and safe place where the kids can just run around without you having to watch them every second. Those places also exist in some cities, but way too few. So great that you don't have a car, (I mean it) car free places in cities I do enjoy, there are just not many of them.
I particularly agree with this statement.
I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century. We believed that office labor was more important and healthier than manual labor. I don't think so.
As a developer, sitting all day typing in a stuffy office, without natural light, without sun, without air, is certainly no healthier than being outdoors, connecting with nature and other people. We come from nature and are made to be active, outdoors, and in the sunlight.
Today, with AI, many white-collar jobs are being called into question, and perhaps we can go back to loving certain traditional jobs.
Of course, I would like more flexibility in choosing how much I and where I do my sedentary labor, so I might devote time to, say, gardening. But it's easy to forget that humans have spent most of human history trying to escape subsistence farming.
I have worked subsistence farming for a small portion of my life, and I cannot tell you how hard it is, physically and psychologically. That was by choice, as part of essentially joining my wife's culture and family. If I were to do that for the remainder of my life it would destroy me.
Anyway, I'm going to go happily work from my desk 30 ft from my bedroom while drinking coffee likely farmed for about ~$0.30/hour while I make a few hundred times that.
Success and failure are choices. Accepting this allows us to take responsibility for the worlds we've created. Ignoring this is self-destructive act of cognitive dissonance and we pay for it years later.
Do you define human history as the last ~10k years or last ~100k-500k years?
But yes, certainly at least the last 3000 years for most humans have been spent farming to a large degree. But if we are even moderate in estimations of human origins, farming is very recent.
Certainly, some people still live as hunter gatherers. I presume people can deduce I do not refer to them.
You'll end up burn out and hating the job (no matter the job) if the company you work for doesn't give a considerable weight to the wellbeing of employees (at the percieved cost of productivity and raw revenue).
Unfortunately, many of us are chained to the modern way of life.
You can make a lot of money doing many skilled manual jobs in my country. Trades are highly paid and there is not enough supply. Better money than software development.
They often wreck their backs, or develop other chronic conditions. The successful ones stop doing manual work by the time they are in their 40s and move to running their own businesses employing 20 year olds.
A friend of mine just lost a family member a few weeks ago. He slipped on a roof.
This is because often the rules and laws protects still human instead the profits.
ps: Unfortunately I agree with you.
As a farmer, it is funny to see how people react to you based on the current profitability winds. When farming is a money maker, everyone acts envious and treats you like a king. When times are tough, they think you're a slack-jawed yokel.
I expect in that lies the answer to your question: We denigrate anything that isn't, as a rule, making a lot of money. Manual jobs generally haven't made much money in the last century, and humorously the exceptions, like professional athlete, get exempted from being considered manual work.
I always wonder what made them become developers at all. Cause my primary motivation for selecting a job was that I explicitly didn't want to ever work manually, I knew that since early childhood and it still didn't change even after 2 burnouts. My secondary motivation was that I liked working with machinery/computers.
Also when I started coding, it immediately felt like my passion. And the thing I love most about coding is that mostly all changes I make have instantly visible results. I couldn't imagine working a job where I had to plant a seed and then wait a week to see if it sprouts.
Also what I love about development is that with modern Docker/Kubernetes setups you can make the environment where your code runs pretty predictable. And with proper backups configured and backup restore testing you aren't really worried about losing the stuff you worked on for months. Meanwhile while farming you can't predict how much sun is gonna shine or how much rain you're gonna get. And you can't prepare for natural disasters which can come anytime and ruin your crops.
So I wonder if it's all just people who never loved software engineering and just went into it for money, and now that they have money after years of working they start looking for their true passion.
In my career so far, I've spent most of my time troubleshooting AWS configs, combing through cloudwatch logs, and wringing requirements out of people, and a lot less of my time actually solving interesting problems.
The walls of my office are gray, as is the carpet, the desks, and the walls of the bullpens. There are awful fluorescent lights overhead, and my eyes are dry and tired. I am exhausted at the end of the day because of the sensory overload of people being on constant teams meetings all around me. They speak with their outside voices, like children.
So yes, I love software development, and maybe someday I will find a better job in this field that gives me the kind of challenging work and problem solving that I signed up for, but working outdoors? surrounded by the sounds of nature with the sun on my face? I'm sure there's a catch, but it sounds nice.
Someone who originally has coding as their passion, for example, might eventually come to dislike it due to overwork. And in doing so they overcompensate by imagining that the total opposite of office work, e.g. farming, would be a better way of life, even though it may not necessarily be true
That said, I think something like a week long course of farming targeted towards white collar workers, with all of the "fun and refreshing" parts but only educational exposure to the painful parts would be a great business idea (or maybe something like that already exists somewhere)
Yet I like planting stuff and gardening as well - why? I think it's a side effect of growing up with parents and grandparents who did that sort of thing as a hobby and I feel it's a bit of a comfort zone for me.
I have been living in villages for about 5 years. I started a pig farm a month back. I have 16 piglets now. I still write software on a daily basis, a mix of client projects and own products. The pig farm needs about 2 hours of cleaning each day. I take care of cleaning. My business partner takes care of feeding.
I plan to grow the pig farm to a capacity of 100 pigs. It is a profitable business with roughly 30% return every 6-7 months. We give the pigs a lot more space and care than I have ever seen in any of those factory-style livestock business videos. With a 100 pigs, I will perhaps spend 5 hours a day in cleaning work - with more tools and employing a couple local folks.
Feel free to check out (links in my bio) or reach out if anyone wants to come and try this out in our little village in north eastern India. The village has large farms, growing all sorts of things.
Any labor throughout human history.
Sure, but sedentary labor destroys the body through neglect—which is ultimately a choice.
Huh? It's not clear to me what you're trying to say here.
There's also a lot of owner/operator one-man shops.
There is one particularly funny point I'd quibble on:
> This was part of a system to discourage communism initially by encouraging ownership of business and preventing absentee landlords accumulating large tracts of land where people who work the fields would be forced into renting.
I'm dubious about the credibility of this assertion, but it is amusing to think that the goal would be to "discourage communism" by a policy that is essentially communistic in nature, in the true definition of the economic system (ownership of the means of production, ie. you own your own labour rather than renting it out).
I am, of course, nitpicking. It's rather easier for me to write comments complaining about things than praising them at length, but I was entertained by the view into the author's experiences and anecdotes.
The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt. It's not dissimilar to pre-1929 kulaks, though the kulaks were encouraged/enabled to become a relatively wealthy/middle class peasantry who employed people and were directly involved in the production without owning large swathes of land, acting as a kind of a social dampener against a revolution.
Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
You can plant cash crops and sell them to buy industrial products. Or you can plant crops that boost your quality of life directly: fruit, vegetables, tobacco, animal fodder.
The "price scissors" (low price of wheat, high price of goods) meant that middling farmers stopped planting wheat that the USSR needed to feed the cities and to pay for imports. To make the peasants plant wheat again the Soviets took away their land in the name of economy of scale (collectivization), but the real goal was to limit the size of personal plots.
So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.
> Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.
Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.
It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them like banners.
Lenin preached for state capitalism as a transitory state towards socialism. It's an integral part of the communist ideas, part of the direction even if not part of the ideal final state.
The core idea of it, I think, is that those landlords must have been the mainsails of prewar Japanese military dictatorship regime and its expansionism under the strong leadership of its emperor, and breaking up land ownership will make it complicated for Japan to re-consolidate power and/or to somehow become closer to the Soviets.
I guess it did serve its core purpose of keeping China/Russia at bay, considering Japan has been extraordinary antagonistic to neighboring, and/or openly communist and/or totalitarian regimes, despite running on a rather ethnocentric communism-from-first-principle political system...
1: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BE%B2%E5%9C%B0%E6%94%B9%E9...
Anyway, yeah, in this context, Japan passed the Agricultural Land Act of 1952, which was intended to turn land owned by a few rich landlords into small, independently owned private farms. That may sound like the opposite of capitalism, and it is, but as I understand it, the idea was to turn what were basically serfs into a proper middle class, by redistributing the wealth and means of production directly down to them, which would then prevent communism from being as appealing. I don't know about the logic, but I guess it worked, since Japan isn't communist?
You are meant to "own the means of production" not in an actual, but more ideal sense. Owning a farm or workshop to the exclusion of other people makes you petit bourgeois and this is bad. Communism promotes collective farms. AFAIK Poland was the only European Eastern Bloc country to tolerate small private farms, as a concession to obstinate peasants after the death of Stalin.
Promoting small individual farms is a more Georgist, populist capitalist or possibly strictly conservative policy. Not speaking to its economic sense though.
The socialist/communist economy is the final extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, towards which USA and other Western countries have been continuously evolving during the last quarter of century. The economy of USA in 2026 is much more similar to the economy of one of the former socialist countries in 1976 than it resembles the economy of USA in 1976.
Small farmers and businessmen were the main enemies of communism, everywhere.
So what Japan enacted was indeed a good anti-communist policy.
Fighting against big companies and supporting small businesses is the opposite of communist policies.
There were a lot of great differences between true communism and what the communists themselves claimed communism to be. There were also a lot of great differences between true communism and what communism has been claimed to be in USA.
Source: I have grown up in a country occupied by communist invaders, so I know what true communism is.
War is peace,
Freedom is slavery,
Ignorance is strength
The point, as I see it, being that politicians like to make contradicting statements. Good for sales you could say. It is possible to cut through such lies by using logic, good on you for doing that. Unfortunately, many people take such statements as true and mostly get confused by it.
- First of all a 95% increase in the price of rice means it less than doubled which is no big deal.
- I think maybe you meant it 20x'ed ? If so I will just eat corn until it comes down (my house eats 100kg of rice in a month)
- Can a suitcase of rice even get through customs?
Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.
There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat.
Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.
I understand most cultures over-appreciate meat, but treating a premium carb source like rice lowly is a surprise.
I can't personally attest to that, but it certainly makes sense. Rice meals vs noodle meals are a fairly fundamental split in Chinese cuisine.
(It doesn't make rice any less of a staple food.)
I find this an interesting contrast with the United States, where the default cooking oil is Canola oil (if you're a person looking to cook your own food; this is the sense in which the Chinese default is corn oil) or soybean oil (if you're a company looking to sell packaged food in grocery stores). As far as I'm aware, traditional China would have had sesame oil and maybe soybean oil, and certainly not corn oil. The advantage of corn oil must be the price.
But if corn oil is so cheap, why does the cheapest oil available in the US seem to be soybean oil?
China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.
In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed to livestock and also used in biodiesel production. There's enormous soybean "crush" infrastructure in the US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to everything else.
Um, rice is real food too, right?
What’s the maths on that? A cup of rice would seem a fair bit for a person for a meal. A cup is about 200g.
That’s 500 portions a month. 5.5 people for 3 meals a day?
I'm putting my money on more people (8-10) but eating less than 200g per meal (1/2 cup uncooked, ~100g for most people)
EDIT, just saw sibling, that's impressive for 5 people, unless the dogs eat a lot of rice too.