Sorry I prefer my cushy job where I actually make money. why would I want a cushy job that doesn't make money?
But I did just become a hobby goat farmer. I am hoping I can get some subsides to buy a new truck.
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- Thread starter SoapyCy
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Sorry I prefer my cushy job where I actually make money. why would I want a cushy job that doesn't make money?
But I did just become a hobby goat farmer. I am hoping I can get some subsides to buy a new truck.
I don't have quite a story like that but I did bale hay from time to time for neighbors which is probably one of the crappiest jobs to do when it's hot and humid out and you are the guy either on the hay rack stacking the bales as they come out of the baler or the guy up in the hay mound stacking them. The most crazy day baling had I had as a teenager was I showed up just after lunch at a neighbor who hired me to help him bale a field. Was probably close to 100 degrees that day and really humid and I have to disclose as part of this story that I have really bad hay fever allergies which sucks when you live on a farm but after the first few allergy spells of the season and keeping up on allergy medicine it hardly bothers you. So I show up and apparently he is waiting to borrow another baler because his isn't working but had baled a field earlier in the week without help so took a wagon out to the field and I had to pick up each bale off the ground and put on the hay rack then stack them from time to time. Got back to the house and went inside to cool off a bit and get something to drink and my arms are just covered in hives from handling the hay. The guy sees them and says "holy crap are you OK? your arms look terrible." I shrug it off and tell him it's my allergies and I'm not sneezing or have itchy eyes so I am fine, the hives will go away when I take a shower later. Well the rest of the day gets even more interesting, the baler shows up and the PTO shaft is too long to fit his tractor so we make a run to the welder to cut part of it off. Once we finally get hooked up and headed to the field as soon as we pull into the field one of the hay rack tires blows so we have to go back and pick up another hay wagon since he didn't have a spare tire on hand. Finally get done after numerous setbacks with 1 thing or another not working right all day then before I leave he jokes that he's cursed and I'll probably have something bad happen now because of it. Well wouldn't you know a few days later I was out on our tractor raking hay with this old PTO driven rake we had and I turned a corner and somehow a big chunk of the windrow gets caught up in the PTO shaft and snaps it right off. Luckily didn't snap the shaft on the tractor just the 1 on the rake itself and I probably spent an hour just getting the tangled mess cleared just so I could take the PTO shaft off and replace it.
Why do you assume net worth is only held in illiquid assets? Non-retirement brokerage accounts, etc...
My dad did custom baling. Like I mentioned how he didn’t believe in hoes or knives to walk beans? He also didn’t believe in gloves for baling. Hands will callous up soon was his idea. Nothing like sore bloody hands for the first few days. I think dad was just cheap and didnt want to pay for gloves.
Also, it's pretty hard to get a loan for a million+ dollars when you have next to no collateral. There are young farmer loan programs out there, but I doubt any of them are starting from nothing.
Bailing hay was the worst. I also have terrible hayfever/allergies but that didn't preclude me from having to sling bales. Two days of work and I would be wrecked for a week. I had to do it to toughen me up, because that will fix allergies. After countless times of doing this and then spending a week trying to recover, Dad finally realized that maybe it wasn't helping my health after all.
I always enjoyed the snakes wrapped up in the "square" bales landing on the trailer. Cut their head off and keep moving.
I worked on a five man masonary crew for two summers during college. Same thing-- no gloves allowed. The owners take was that they were for pu$$ies. Hardest $2.50/hr. I ever made. Made class at Iowa State look pretty good.
I'd do bailing hay in heat and humidity over detassling.
On the rack you at least get an occasional breeze. Those hot spots in the corn were something else.
Never did detassling thankfully. I worked some odds and ends jobs either on our acreage or for other farmers then once I got a drivers license got a part time job in the meat department at the local grocery store. We showed cattle while growing up and we to this day still have one of those old wooden barns with the hay mound in it and the stalls we keep cattle in when we were showing or use in the spring to calve do not have doors big enough to get a skid loader into so you can guess how all the manure gets hauled out of there... yup 1 pitch fork full at a time either out the door where the loader bucket can scoop it up or directly into the spreader parked right outside the door. We learned quickly that the best way not to have to dig through layers of compacted straw and manure is to just clean the stalls out every day and re-bed as needed else you'd be spending a nice summer day filling up a load or 2 into the spreader 1 pitchfork at a time.
I don't regret any of it 1 bit as some good hard manual labor on the farm that leaves you exhausted at the end of the day builds a strong work ethic and character. Makes me appreciate my desk job even more now, especially on those cold windy winter days it's much nicer sitting in a warm office building than outside trying to thaw out a frozen cattle waterer with a hair dryer and sometimes having to stick your hand down in to ice cold water to free a valve up. I still enjoy helping out from time to time with my parent's cattle operation or my in-laws farm when we visit but I am glad I don't have to do what they do to earn a living because it's a lot of hard labor and hours for what is a thankless job for some people and the attitudes some here have toward farming is a perfect example of that.
Did you ever bale straw? That stuff is awful, 10x worse than hay. Sooooo itchy.
Having another person on the rack makes things so much easier. Having to stack a rack really sucked but I'd rather be on the rack than in the barn loft with no moving air. Makes me shudder thinking about those days.
I am waiting for the shreaks the first time my wife finds a snake in the hay bales for the goats.
Cause we're talkin bout farmers. Not bankers here. Anyone who has to take out million dollar loans to freaking plant every year doesn't have liquid assets.
Agree on all the field work. I enjoy going back and helping with yard work to really feel that connection of doing that kind of work outside.
Detassling was a lot of rugged work but I actually really liked it. Did it all through high school and 2-3 years in college.
Each 4 rows was our own 'block' that we did, labeled with a flag, and we got paid by the acre. Then we'd do checks of the field where we'd check one anothers' blocks.
If you want to test friends' abilities to get along, put them out in a field 40 miles from home from 8-12 hours/day for two weeks with the only transportation being the bus.
The best detassling job I ever had was working on a large crew. One of my friend's parents would contract a slew of acres to be detassled and would hire a bunch of people to work the fields. We were paid a variable hourly rate depending on how quickly we got things done. Everyone on the crew started their lap at the same time and if you were done faster, you got to hang out at your vehicle until everyone had finished. The faster people would often dig the slower ones out, but that was your choice. (my younger sister was one of the slow people, I had to do a lot of digging out)
We made crazy money doing it and I'm sure my friend's parents cleaned up as well. If you needed a day off, you could just take it off. People didn't like to do that because the money was too good to turn down - either you could do the work or you couldn't. Really slow people were ran off by the group - it was a problem that fixed itself.
Being tall certainly was an advantage at that job.
Over/under 2 hours every day trying to figure out how to pay $0 in taxes even if it may or may not be harmful long term?
Yes. I had a meeting with a guy a number of years ago about raising seed corn that was buying his way into farming. He was an engineer of some sort from Germany. His personal pilot used to run a farm so he hired him as a farm manager and sunk millions upon millions into getting started. He basically started buying whatever acres he could find (I think 2-3 thousand at that point), cash renting whatever acres he find, equipment, bin setup, shop, etc. It was wild.
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