History Memes

Farm work wasn’t all day for most of the year until it became industrialised. Plants and animals take a lot of time to grow, and can mostly be left alone while they do it.

Bruh.

Animals can't be left alone while they 'grow'. They need constant tending, even when you aren't harvesting animal products from them. Especially in the winter, when they can't reliably forage for themselves (meaning either butchery or high-intensity care wrt food and water is required).

Plants cannot be left alone while they grow. The process of weeding, spreading manure, and tending crops in intensive farming includes labor during the entire growing season; the process of constant sowing and plowing in extensive farming also includes labor during the entire growing season, but spread over a wider area.

If one farmer is only producing enough food for fifty people, they end up with a lot of downtime, albeit with a few days a year that require all nighters.

That's not even close a serious opinion on pre-modern agriculture.

One farmer producing enough food for fifty people is a number you wouldn't seen until the 20th century. In the medieval period, subsistence farmers would typically produce enough food for themselves (you could say 'and their families', but anyone who knows a farming family knows that farming is family work - and it remains one of the few areas where even modern law yields to 'traditional' child labor standards), and the only surplus being fractional. Hence a major reason why urbanization rates were so low - in the 17th century, which itself saw major agricultural advances, urbanization was still only 5%-10%. ~90% of the population was rural - and a majority of that rural population were farmers or other agricultural workers. Even with the agricultural revolution of the 18th-19th centuries, vastly improved yields allowed each farmer to provide for only around five people (on average; individual numbers varied wildly).

Furthermore, there's a reason the term 'working from sunup to sundown' refers to a long workday in common parlance - traditionally, working past natural light is not very practical. "All nighters" are not something that happens often, and certainly not for farmers of all professions, both because of the fickleness of early lights, and because of the high expense of fuel.

Only when machines and fertiliser become able to let one farmer support thousands of people does there start to be something to do all day every day, and that needs the Haber process, which was a 20th century development.

Most of those machines are labor-saving devices. Fertilizer simply allows for 'sustainable' monocrops, reduction of field rotations, and an increase in financially viable arable land - ie land that is profitable to work for profit instead of subsistence.

18th and 19th century plantation work by slaves was not an idyllic part-time task because there simply wasn't enough for them to do agriculturally.