#because it was dusk at that point and we'd had predators get goats in the past

[rhysintherain]

"Didn't start work until 10-12"? Lol tell me you've never had livestock without telling me you've never had livestock.

Milk-producing livestock need to be fed every 12 hours. That means you need to either provide food first thing in the morning and last thing at night, or let them out in the morning and bring them in at night.

You also need to milk them once a day at a consistent time.

That's not including processing milk into shelf-stable products before it spoils.

If we're talking independent (say neolithic or early bronze age) farmers, your biggest expense won't be food, it'll be textiles. Tanning leather, spinning and weaving animal and plant fibers, and repairing existing garments will be a full-time job for several members of your family. This will be most intensive in winter, but will be needed to some extent all year.

Farmed foods require A Lot of prep. Have you ever ground flour by hand? It could take someone 12 hours of labor to go from a unit of grain to a single loaf of bread, depending on the technique and tools available. How about churning butter by hand? Separating cream? Making cheese? Smoking and drying meat? These processes all rely heavily on specific timing, and together would require nonstop attention to get right. If you get them wrong, your family starves.

Any change in climate can threaten your livelihood. You rely on far fewer species than hunter-gatherers did, and if the summer is too hot, or too damp, or you get a midsummer hailstorm, or a grass fire, you lose your food for that winter. The archaeological record has a few striking examples of early farmers who resorted to extreme measures to survive a hard year. It took centuries for us to get to a point where we understood crops and seasons enough to reliably provide for ourselves.

Farming is also 100% a group activity. You cannot subsistence farm alone. Depending on farm size, you need 5-10 full-time working individuals, most of them able-bodied, to work a subsistence farm. If someone dies, they need to be replaced. If your child leaves, it could make your livelihood unsustainable. That's why farming cultures tend to have more kids than urban or hunter-gatherer cultures.

You want to idealise a method of subsistence? Go with coastal hunter-gatherers. There's a reason some places never developed farming, or only adopted it when someone else brought it in (and it's not because they "weren't advanced" enough to figure it out). It's because there was no reason to make yourself solely responsible for the nature when the nature reliably produces what you need on its own.

Don't get me wrong, agriculture was probably necessary for some peoples in some environments. But it's still objectively a bad deal. It makes your food species dependent on your labor, it narrows your effective land base, and it limits your usable species pool. It takes 2-3 times as much work as hunting and gathering in productive environments. It requires more people to do successfully, and it makes you susceptible to all sorts of bullshit that comes along with 'civilisation', like capitalism, feudalism, and serfdom.

HALT!✋😐

did you remember to express gratitude for not having to subsistence farm today?