Your Fictional Farm is Wrong
Apr. 30th, 2019 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://bit.ly/2WgBGfk
kailthia:
elodieunderglass:
lynnafred:
Or, How To Write Life on a Farm
By me. A person who spends more than half their waking hours on a farm.
So you’re sitting down to write a fic, and you decide on a farming AU. It’s something that you don’t expect to put a lot of time in, it’s only for fun, and really, let’s face it: you haven’t been to a farm since your second grade field trip where you got to pet a cow and that one really unfortunate kid (you know the one) slipped off the bus and fell in mud and had to walk around in borrowed coveralls three sizes too big all day.
If you’re expecting something like this:
(yes that’s my farm STOP JUDGING ME)
Then you’re forgetting the two most important things about farming.
Farming is GROSS and farming is WEIRD AS FUCK.
Read on for some schooling about life on farms and how you, too, can incorporate some good old farming zaniness into your next WIP.
Keep reading
Things Are Gross and Things Are Strange
a couple other things of note from my own experience in a farm family:
farm people are not sentimental about the animals. You learn very early as a child that the critters get turned into food. You can be fond of the animals, but that’s tempered by the fact that there are no pets on a farm. Even the domestic animals work - the cats kill mice/bugs, the dogs help with other animals and/or chase away birds, etc
similarly, any child on a farm knows that meat doesn’t come from behind the counter of the store. If they’re young, they probably don’t see/help with butchering, but they know.
Animals poop a lot. A lot.
You have work clothes/shoes - especially boots, for safety reasons. You change out of them when you come inside. They’re dirty and stinky. For your convenience as a writer, treat it like a uniform. Your character doesn’t spend their non-work time in their fantasy McDonald’s uniform, they wouldn’t spend it in their barn clothes. For some of the same reasons.
All the things in the bulleted list in the OP are true, and correct, but they are notably vegetable-centric. Understand that if you add in livestock, it immediately gets one thousand times grosser and more stressful, because like, it sucks if you forget to roll up the wall of the greenhouse and your seedlings get too hot and die, but when you forget to roll up the wall of the chick brooder and your baby chicks have the exact same thing happen to them it is SO MUCH WORSE. I won’t get into how many animals eat one another sort of casually, or the things you’ll find inside of a chicken on the processing line, and so on. And the poop. Oh god the poop.
Also, anyone whose cute farm AU includes a farmer’s market?
That shit is not cute, for the most part, and there are meetings, and there’s drama, and it’s super, super, super exactly like the rest of the real world. I support them, of course, and I love working on the farm, but I don’t for a second think of the farmer’s market as a cute romantic place.
(Your picture was not posted)
kailthia:
elodieunderglass:
lynnafred:
Or, How To Write Life on a Farm
By me. A person who spends more than half their waking hours on a farm.
So you’re sitting down to write a fic, and you decide on a farming AU. It’s something that you don’t expect to put a lot of time in, it’s only for fun, and really, let’s face it: you haven’t been to a farm since your second grade field trip where you got to pet a cow and that one really unfortunate kid (you know the one) slipped off the bus and fell in mud and had to walk around in borrowed coveralls three sizes too big all day.
If you’re expecting something like this:
(yes that’s my farm STOP JUDGING ME)
Then you’re forgetting the two most important things about farming.
Farming is GROSS and farming is WEIRD AS FUCK.
Read on for some schooling about life on farms and how you, too, can incorporate some good old farming zaniness into your next WIP.
Keep reading
Things Are Gross and Things Are Strange
a couple other things of note from my own experience in a farm family:
farm people are not sentimental about the animals. You learn very early as a child that the critters get turned into food. You can be fond of the animals, but that’s tempered by the fact that there are no pets on a farm. Even the domestic animals work - the cats kill mice/bugs, the dogs help with other animals and/or chase away birds, etc
similarly, any child on a farm knows that meat doesn’t come from behind the counter of the store. If they’re young, they probably don’t see/help with butchering, but they know.
Animals poop a lot. A lot.
You have work clothes/shoes - especially boots, for safety reasons. You change out of them when you come inside. They’re dirty and stinky. For your convenience as a writer, treat it like a uniform. Your character doesn’t spend their non-work time in their fantasy McDonald’s uniform, they wouldn’t spend it in their barn clothes. For some of the same reasons.
All the things in the bulleted list in the OP are true, and correct, but they are notably vegetable-centric. Understand that if you add in livestock, it immediately gets one thousand times grosser and more stressful, because like, it sucks if you forget to roll up the wall of the greenhouse and your seedlings get too hot and die, but when you forget to roll up the wall of the chick brooder and your baby chicks have the exact same thing happen to them it is SO MUCH WORSE. I won’t get into how many animals eat one another sort of casually, or the things you’ll find inside of a chicken on the processing line, and so on. And the poop. Oh god the poop.
Also, anyone whose cute farm AU includes a farmer’s market?
That shit is not cute, for the most part, and there are meetings, and there’s drama, and it’s super, super, super exactly like the rest of the real world. I support them, of course, and I love working on the farm, but I don’t for a second think of the farmer’s market as a cute romantic place.
(Your picture was not posted)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-30 12:53 pm (UTC)That shit is not cute, for the most part, and there are meetings, and there’s drama, and it’s super, super, super exactly like the rest of the real world.
Absolutely yes, this! My daughter has had more heartburn over farmer's market politics than over tomato virus, electrical power failures, or hawks/foxes/whatever getting in to her poultry. They have ditched the Farmer's Market entirely in favor of their own farmstand (and other value-added farm-related activities.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-30 01:18 pm (UTC)he had to go to a meeting on saturday where he sat and for 45 solid minutes everyone hurled invective at him, personally.
he spends about 20 hours a week on this instead of running his farm, which means everyone else has to pick up his slack, which is rough given that there are only three full-timers including him and everyone works 80-hour weeks. but if he didn't do it, the market might fold, and they need the income stream from it.
on his way into the movie theater to see Endgame with my sister he got a phone call from the news, who was running a story sympathetic to a local farmer who didn't complete his application to the farmer's market and thus wasn't accepted, and who has gone on a PR blitz about how terrible they are, and who he's probably going to have to call the cops on for setting up at the first outdoor market anyway next week even though, as we can repeat, he never completed his application and then posted a fabricated rejection letter to his facebook and has now gotten himself on five different local news sources to talk about it without any of those news sources actually contacting the actual farmer's market in any kind of timely fashion. (The story aired while BIL was actually in the movie, that's how far in advance they asked him for a comment.)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-30 01:30 pm (UTC)This is going to be their first year without being at the Market, so we'll see how it goes. They were going to be able to scale down their production and number of employees, which was going to be good, and get back a big chunk of their Wednesdays and Saturdays, which was also going to be good! Hopefully it will all work out.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-30 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-05-01 12:14 am (UTC)My big thing is that I wish more fantasy authors factored in the logistics of food production. It's one of those things that I know just enough about, which is to say not very much at all, for it to be glaring.
no subject
Date: 2019-05-01 12:58 am (UTC)RL AU settings don't work for me because I have too much experience at RL, basically. :D I live here, I work here, I really really really don't want to read fic about a romanticised version of here! Romanticising it kills my suspension of disbelief, because I know That's Not How That Works.