Back in time, at some conveniently obscure point, people
used to have to work quite hard to grow food. Weather wasn't
as deeply understood, soil chemistry, water quality, pest
and disease management were all largely guesswork and
prayers. In this assumptively rough and uneducated past,
people had a difficult time putting food in their mouths.

But were they happier? Luckily for them, they didn't have
droves of data-hungry maniacs (man and machine) following
their every heartbeat and thought. They didn't have surveys
and heat maps and privacy leeches and big data. So we can't
rightly say, I think, if they were happier. All we can say
with our previous analysis is that we're largely unhappy; at
least, in terms of job satisfaction. Job[1] as in, what we
do in order to simply survive and exist in modern society.

Rewinding again to my semi-mythical past, I envision people
that were largely employed in not dying. They fit into
society first and foremost by perpetuating the species and
not putting a huge burden on others. Perhaps it is a time
after the neolithic revolution but before the agricultural
revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, a time before
the machine age and industrial revolution.

Were they more satisfied with their "jobs" than we are? And
why is it that in order to fit into our post-industrial,
almost-post-information-age society, we must all be either
industrial-age-type workers, or "mind workers"[2]? Sure, we
have farmers still: post-industrial, mega-farmers with
government subsidies and controls; highly focused, high-
value crop farmers; and hobby farmers. But what about the
farmer who's real "job" is to farm some land, create
enough food for themselves and their familes, and maybe
some extra to sell or trade for other goods?

User gunnarfrost has an enjoyable and succinct phlog that
I like to read. He recently posted[3] about job
satisfaction, or lack thereof. I say he posted about that
subject, but I presume quite a bit; I don't know for
sure if it's a "he" and I don't know for sure if
gunnarfrost meant for his post to be interpreted the way
I interpret it. From what I read, I saw the musings of
a person that would rather be enjoying a different aspect
of life, rather than doing what they're doing for a job.

Modern times. People with jobs they hate, surveyed and
analyzed to death, worked to death, zombies in a world
that demands their integration and participation. For
nourishment they eat "food" from boxes and cans and
drive-thrus. If they pay a little more they can have
actual food, reduced-chemical-usage food, "fresh" food
that has been shipped around the country or world and
that was picked before it was ripe, or that has been
chemically ripenedd, genetically altered to be firmer,
more durable, and more lasting.

I don't know if you can tell, or if anyone will tolerate
this kind of drivel for long enough to get to this
paragraph, but i'm wandering on purpose. Maybe I'm
hoping that I'll discover something, I don't know. There
are two things in my head, that are really one and the
same thing: first, that people in some past time had it
better; and second, that we're disallowed from doing things
our own way in our time.

I can't prove either idea.

After high school, my friends and I went to work in the IT
industry, which was absolutely booming, and which we loved.
At first it felt like we were going to be allowed to have
a career that melded our personal hobbies and passions with
the needs of corporations and capitalists, and come out on
top. Then as the years rolled by, we realized that we were
just glorified grunt workers of a new variety, and that our
ideas and passions didn't matter in this world of cogs and
tasks.

One friend, however, did not follow the same path. He did
the "IT" thing for a year, saved every penny he earned,
then quit his job, bought a bicycle and rode it from
Oregon to Mexico with nothing but the clothes on his back
and the money in his bank account.

You could say that he "bucked the trend" or that he "took
the road less travelled." I don't know what to call it
really. It was an interesting and less-common thing that
he did, the kind of thing that makes other people say
"wow, I wish I could do something like that." Of course,
what they really mean is "wow, I wish I could do something
like that and still have all the comfort, ease, and
security that comes with living a conventional, societally-
accepted 'normal' life. If only doing interesting things
didn't have such a high mental and emotional cost."

But that's the past, and it's getting ever more distant
with each day. I'm not fresh out of high school any more,
and I'm not getting any fresher. People that do radical
things are getting less numerous in my circle of friends,
family, and acquaintances. We've "settled down" for the
most part. We have kids and families and mortgages and
debts, and loads of other nonsense that is supposed to
keep us in line. Lock-step, line-toeing, well-behaved
members of society. For the good of the people.

But those long-dead mythical happy-farmers are still
bugging me, and in a circuitous way I think it's all
related. I'd get to the point, but I don't know what
the point is, so I'll just do my best.

A few years ago, I used to live in Phoenix Arizona. If
you're not familiar with the area, suffice it to say that
it is an endlessly sunny, sub-tropical desert. If that
still doesn't help clarify, think of it as a "just add
water" sort of place. Almost anything will grow there,
as long as you can get water. And if you know the right
people- the ones that have lived and gardened in that
region for years- you can plant and harvest year-round.

While we lived there, I tore out the small patch of
grass next to the pool in our back yard (every other
house there has a pool, speaking hyperbolically) and put
in a garden. It was a small plot of land, a fraction of
a suburban yard, best measured in square feet. I made
narrow raised-beds, and created an automatic watering
system (because if you forget to water your garden in
Phoenix, it dies a horrible and rapid death.)

Since I live in the post-industrial, data-rich information
age, I was able to manage my garden according to modern
high-yield methods. We got more food out of that garden
than we knew what to do with. The zucchini were enormous,
the peppers were abundant, the lettuce wouldn't stop
growing, the kale and chard were like monstrous fronds
from some jurassic age jungle. Really, if you don't
believe me, move to Phoenix and try it. With minimal
effort and a very small space, a single human being can
easily grow enough food to live on and more.

That was tfurrows the hobby farmer. Sadly, I still
bought a lot of food from the store, even when it was
popping out of the ground in my back yard. Oh, the
foolishness of me. Going to work for dollar bills and
then trading them for nutrient-defficient foods was
more interesting at the time. The unexplained green
things in the back yard were just a curiosity, a thing
to talk about at parties.

So what then, of tfurrows the career farmer, who feeds
his family and has more to sell or trade after that is
accomplished? And what of his friend, the fictional sheep
farmer, who'd rather manage animals than kale, but who
likes to eat something other than mutton from time to time?
And the cow farmer who tires of butter and the goat farmer
and the yarn spinner and the weaver and the knitter and
the host of other fictional folks? Not the ancient ones,
we're talking the tfurrows contemporaries at this point,
who can extract the value from the information age and
turn it to highly-productive use?

We whine and complain that the capitalists control the
means of production, but in this day and age, they do not.
We are wild humans, surrounded by- even buried in- life
improving informaiton. But we don't use it. Tfurrows the
vegetable farmer doesn't exist, and neither do his friends
the goat, cow, and yarn farmers. Maybe they do exist, and
I'm just not invited. Maybe I just haven't found them yet.

(I'll mention at this point that I have a migraine today,
and that writing in gray text on a black screen is kind of
cathartic. It's taking my mind off my head, and so I will
continue.)

I've written about it before, I think, but I'll mention it
in context here again. My mother owns a fair amount of acres
in Oregon- prime farm land. In fact, the zoning is such
there that the land is designated as "high-value farm land."
That's an old designation, and it meant "land that had a
high value as farm land." In other words, it's great for
farming.

Of course, that was before Intel, Nike, and whoever else
moved in next door. Now, it's high-value land for those who
want an easy, back-roadsy commute to their high-paying
tech jobs. Sure, you *could* still farm on it- and I'll
get to that in a minute- but it's worth more as space for
houses of all shapes and kinds and costs.

Enter the endless regulations. Oregon is a nanny-state, who
absolutely loves regulation. The warmth and comfort of the
caring hand of the State will provide everything that the
troubled and harried citizen may need, or could ever
possibly want. They want to provide it. It's a tough job,
but they're willing.

Of course, management costs money. And in Oregon, the
land of zero sales tax, the money has to come from
somewhere, so it comes from property tax. And land-use
regulation. Property tax is perhaps a more evident way
to make money, so let's talk about how land-use
regulation can make a county more or less money,
depending on how it is used.

In the county that my mom has property in, she pays
more in property taxes monthly than I pay for my
entire mortgage. This drives out the elderly, which
I have seen, but it's still not enough. What a person
can do with their land is highly regulated. Not for
safety or any other more justifiable reason, but
to maintain the "country feel" and "heritage" of the
area.

Property tax is based on land value. That is, the value
of the raw land, and the value of any improvements on that
land. So, if you have some land, and you drop a yurt on it
to live in, you haven't added much value to the land, and
therefore you haven't increased the taxable value.
Therefore, yurts are not allowable.

If you drop a cheap house on the land, you haven't really
increased the value as much as you could. The county can't
allow this, and so they have to find a way to keep poor
people out. But, they can't just say "no poor people with
cheap houses allowed," since that would not look good,
especially in a supposedly liberal and progressive state.
So, they came up with a better idea.

In my mom's county, for all that "high value farm land"
that is sitting around, they first created restrictions
on how the land could be split up. Want a sub-division?
Nah. We can't have humans cropping up all over the place,
building cheap houses on small plots. We'll concentrate
them in the cities. When she bought her lot, it could
be split, I think I recall, into 10acre parcels. Fine,
she could split it up and give plots to her kids to
build on later.

Oops, the regulations changed after she bought it. Now
she can't split it at all. This really got the goats
of a lot of folks, who after thinking on it for maybe
10-20 years, decided to put something on the ballot.
Enter Measure 37, which intended to give people back the
land-use rights they had when they bought their property.
The people loved it, and it passed. Now she can split
her land up again, either for fun or profit.

Oops again. The people can't be trusted to come up with a
measure and pass it, and take money away from the State.
Enter measure 49, quick, before measure 37 can really
be allowed to go into effect. Convince the liberal base
in the state that the evil conservatives and captialists
are tainting the nature of the region, hell-bent on
creating an over-developed mess. Pour money into the
campaign and ram it through. Disaster averted. As a
concession, my mom can now split her land in 2 pieces,
30 acres each.

So now she can build a nice little house on the other
parcel, and one of her kids at least can live nearby.

Enter the building codes.

Since this is high-value farm land, the owner of the
land needs to be a farmer. But not just any farmer- and
here's where they banned poor people without saying as
much- it has to be a highly profitable and productive
farm. In the late 80s, on the same land in the same
county, you had to show a "farm plan" that would
generate at least $15k of income a year, before they
would give you a building permit. As a kid, I helped
my aunt plan christmas trees on her 15acre plot up
the road so she could get her building permit. It was
enough. She wasn't a farmer, she was a hoop-jumper,
doing what the county required so she could live on
her property.

In 2018, you have to actually demonstrate $80k/year
for two years before they will give you a permit.
Yeah, that's a reasonable wage to expect as a farmer,
and it will certain encourage all kinds of farming
to happen, right?

Of course not. what it *does* accomplish is exactly
what the county intends: narrows the field of who
will live in the area and what they will do on their
land.

Far from having to speculate, I can tell you from
experience exactly what is happening to the land all
around my mother's house. The only things that will
generate enough income to allow for building are
vineyards, llammas, and marijuana. Since marijuana
is still up-in-the-air and regulated, the countryside
is now covered with vineyards primarmily, and there is
a llama farm up the road.

Mission accomplised, from the point of view of the
county. They now have taxable income from businesses,
as well has a huge improved property value to tax,
and the vineyard owners build giant houses. At least,
all the ones that have moved in have built giant
houses. The "poor" farmers are forced out, even the
ones that would love to retire on property they
own free-and-clear. Because, you see, you don't
actually own the property, the county does.

The real-life example I'm thinking of is a christmas
tree farmer that lived in a town next to mine. It was
an old couple who had lived there their entire lives.
The farm was theirs, the house was theirs, and they
just wanted to live out their days there. But, the
county realized that the land was worth too much to
be left as a christmas tree farm. The valuation was
so high that this old couple simply couldn't
afford the property taxes. Their options were to
sell to a developer (it was "in town"), or let
the government take it. They wanted to die there,
but that was not allowed. They sold it. If I recall
properly where they used to live, there is an entire
neighborhood of nice houses and a variety of other
buildings there now.

I'll admit that I strayed, but I did have a point,
and that is this: it's not necessarily legal, with
today's society and laws, for farmer tfurrows to
really exist. And the reason is that tfurrows is an
asset to be exploited, and one that can't propertly be
exploited if he is off farming his own food somewhere.

Ok, it's not a point, but rather a hypothesis. And since
a hypothesis is meant to be tested, I intend to have a
little experiment. I don't know how it will work out,
because I don't control all of the variables. I have a
wife and kids, who require or demand or expect certain
things. I have a government that requires, demands, and
expects certain things. So, I have to make the best of
what options and variables I can control.

My plan is, first, to eliminate debt. Debt is slavery,
and while I've mostly avoided it, I am by no means
free of it. I think I can be. The biggest debt that I
have is my house. I'm selling it. I bought it as a
foreclosure at the end of the housing market decline
a few years back, so I'll be able to turn a profit.
I'll use that profit to pay off debt, and to purchase
another house in cash, in some other state where
houses are cheaper. I've found a few suitable areas.

The second part of my plan is to establish myself as
a producer rather than simply a consumer. I hope to
get a house with some amount of land- I'm looking at
one on 3acres that is in my price range. I want to
produce as much of my own food as possible, and enough
to can and store as well. I don't have a plan to
sell or barter it, that may come later. I want to learn
the art of modern micro-farming, root cellars, and
other sundry things that will contribute to making me
a producer.

The third step in my plan is to shift my career away from
technology. I love technology, but I don't love some of
the things it does in my life. I want technology to be a
resource that I can tap into, not a constant demand on
my time and attention. I guess what I want is to be more
in control of how technology exists in my life. I have a
plan for this career shift, we'll see if it works.

With my magical three-step plan, I think I can effectively
become the farmer tfurrows that I've been thinking of.
Not the same as the farmers of old, or the mega-ultra
farmers of today, but a new kind of farmer. I can test the
hypothesis and see if society and the State will tolerate
me. At best I think I can hope to be overlooked or
ignored. But who knows, maybe there is more available in
that life than I imagine. I'm curious, and I'll find out
one way or another.


[1] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Job
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com:70/0/Information Age
[3] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/gunnarfrost/20180301.post

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