Did you train ON A FARM? Why yes!

So I am a fan of both Call to Agriculture and Arcadia tropes. At a certain a point in my story, a veteran bad-ass invites the protagonist to come help him on his farm (in Texas no less). The idea being it would be a welcome break from the madness the protagonist usually faces on their adventures and allow for some peaceful contemplation (just doing menial chores and keeping your mind free of worries). Being a science fiction story it also serves to act as a contrast since even with high tech tractors and GPS guided crop rotations, farming still requires a manual/hands on approach.

My questions are more on the technical end of the spectrum:

1. What kind of farm would work best? Crops? Livestock?

2. How many employees would an average farm require?

3. Why kind of day-to-day tasks are appropriate for a teenager? Consider this though, my protagonist is a cyborg with superhuman strength and durability (Captain America scale, nothing too wild).

4. Is a farm a good place for a hideout? Or would it be too out in the open and non-secure?

5. How is a farm different from a ranch?

edited 3rd Jan '16 2:20:13 PM by SmokingBun

4. I think it would be. I grew up on a small farm (20 acres) tucked away in the backwoods of southeastern Pennsylvania. If you didn't know it was there, you... well, you wouldn't even know it was there. Even from the air, it would look like just another pasture/field that belonged to one of the bigger neighboring farms.

A farm/ranch with hundreds or thousands of acres, might be "out in the open," but to find one particular individual in such a huge spread of territory would require a LOT of searching. Even if you used a spy satellite, how can you distinguish one hired hand from another?

5. A ranch is typically dedicated to the raising of grazing animals (cattle, horses, sheep, goats, etc.) rather than crops. Non-grazing animals, such as pigs and chickens, are raised on a farm.

edited 3rd Jan '16 2:43:39 PM by pwiegle

How many employees would depend on the size of the farm, what they're farming, and how much technology they're using.

On a dairy farm with around 400 cattle, modern milking machines, tractors, motorcycles etc, you can get away with the farmer, his wife and their oldest offspring.

If the setting is futuristic, there could be a greater degree of automation - you could have robots herd the cows into the milking shed (through automated gates) and even assembly-line-style robots to put the cups on the teats with the farmer acting more as an overseer than taking an active role.

For #3, I can offer a bit of personal insight. Granted, my parents' place was only a "pleasure" farm, where we kept a small number of riding horses. A larger "working" farm would be even more labor-intensive.

Feed, hay, and water the horses twice a day. Turn them out in the pasture for grazing.

Muck out the stable every day or two. In the summer, when they can spend more time turned out, there is obviously less mucking out to do.

Curry and groom the horses about once a week or so. Do it on a rotating schedule so you don't have to do more than one horse in a single day. If they get especially dirty, say from rolling in the mud, you'll have to bathe them with a hose and a bucket. But that's usually reserved for summertime, unless you have an indoor wash stall and a hot water heater in the barn.

Every couple of weeks, make a trip to the feed store. Manhandle sacks of grain weighing 50 to 100 pounds each.

If the barn has a big hayloft, you might only have to put in hay every six months. If not, you'll have to go to a neighboring farm and load up the pickup truck about once a month. If you stack and balance the load properly, you can pile anywhere from 30 to 50 bales of hay on a truck, depending on how big it is. Each bale can weigh fifty pounds or more, depending on the type of hay, and how wet it was when it was baled.

If the horses have been ridden or otherwise exercised hard, they'll need to be cooled down afterwards. This involves walking them around on a lead rope slowly until they relax and are ready to be put away.

Riding tack (saddles, bridles, etc.) gets very dirty and needs to be cleaned with a bucket of warm water, a sponge, and some saddle soap, then hung up to dry. Afterwards, oil it to keep the leather from drying out and cracking.

In the warmer months, mow the pastures like you would mow the lawn, only using much bigger equipment.

Inspect and mend fences periodically. Horses are escape artists, and always manage to find a way to get out. Usually at the most inconvenient times, like the middle of the f***ing night.

edited 4th Jan '16 3:28:42 PM by pwiegle

@pwiegle

4. That's good to know. But isn't 20 acres like very small? I ask because I read the average farm size in America was from 2,000 to 20,000 acres. Regardless, as per your descriptions a farm seems like the ideal place to disappear for a while.

5. I think I'll stick with a conventional farm then.

@Wolf1066

Wow! That's far less than and I imagined. The setting is not too futuristic, just 10 years in the future but since we're in the America's there is a far greater presence of automation as you mentioned. I like your robot milkers idea.

I've settled on a Corn Farm (boy that's original!) and I suppose I could limit myself to just 7 guys based on how I portray the day to day activities and how rich/automated the farm is.

@pwiegle

Thanks for the insight. That's the kind of hands-on work I was talking about. Even with automation as has become common, there would be plenty of work to do regardless. I basically have a list of chores now for my protagonist to perform provided I can make her wake 6 AM sharp (lol!).

Yes, 20 acres is very small, for a farm. Like I said, it was just pasture for a few riding horses (I think the most we ever had at one time was eight. Four or five was a more usual number.)

But in my part of the USA, there are lots of tiny little "pleasure farms" like this, owned by people who have regular non-farming jobs. Commercial farms, where farming is their actual business, are obviously much larger.

edited 4th Jan '16 4:10:03 PM by pwiegle