It's the two extremes of work. One is hard physical work directly associated with producing the things you need to stay alive, the other is purely intellectual work which is 20 levels of abstraction away from your necessities.
> Farming is hard work. Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
It depends on the scale, I know 80+ years old people living in the countryside, still splitting their own wood, growing their own garden/orchard, manually removing potatoe bugs from their decently sized potatoe field, cutting grass with a scythe, taking care of their chickens/goats/sheeps... they're 100% self sustained and use tools from the 19th century they inherited from their parents. They're in better physical and mental shape than most code monkeys I know while being 50+ years older
> I know 80+ years old people living in the countryside ...
I do too, and not a single one of them is happy about it. Every person I talked to, starting from my grandparents, wants to move to a city where heating etc is taken care of for you, but in their age it's easier to continue doing what they've always been doing instead of enduring massive changes like that.
At least they grew in nature, mostly free of obesity and other modern diseases, the grass is always greener... I'll take that over breathing tire/brake dust and sitting 10 hours a day in front of a glass rectangle
I've met an 80+ year old farmer who looks old and frail but raises calves and keeps 80 hives, and he moves those fully loaded hive boxes like it's nothing. It's rather surprising the first time you see it.
That's still survivorship bias. Figure out how those 300 survived and why an exponentially larger number of people didn't and you might have a solution for all the people who want to get into farming.
There are many reasons why people quit commercial farming, none of them apply to personal farms, and you seem to not consider what people lost to become urbanites
> Farming is hard work. Modern farmers have college degrees, millions in equipment, and a vast amount of knowledge and experience you do not have.
It depends on the scale, I know 80+ years old people living in the countryside, still splitting their own wood, growing their own garden/orchard, manually removing potatoe bugs from their decently sized potatoe field, cutting grass with a scythe, taking care of their chickens/goats/sheeps... they're 100% self sustained and use tools from the 19th century they inherited from their parents. They're in better physical and mental shape than most code monkeys I know while being 50+ years older