What temperature zone is the land? What kinds of things are currently growing there? What's the soil like? What is the water source? All these things matter a lot for what you're able to do with it.
Pecan groves are nice, but take a long time to establish.
I have strong negative feelings about solar and wind farms. Solar farms make the whole area hotter, more glaring, and worse, are placed exactly where the electricity is least needed, and I don't know if they're easy to maintain or not, but wouldn't expect so given the kinds of minerals that go into making them.
The water source is important for a farm or anything aquatic.
Ranching is very common, but also doesn't seem that great a lifestyle, unless you're into that specifically, which it doesn't seem like you are. Desert ranching, especially, seems to be a lot of trying to find the cattle and hoping they don't overgraze the land, lots of driving pickup trucks, hauling stuff around, moving heavy objects. I like this guy https://www.amazon.com/Dirt-Soil-Familys-Regenerative-Agriculture/dp/1603587632 but that isn't desert.
Edit: If you're allowed to build a well, but there isn't one yet, research that first! Someone in my area just said they spent $60,000 on digging a new well when their previous shallow well was depleted.
Gaashk
23hr ago
This seems relevant to the other threads about why many women seem to prefer being in the workforce and making a legible amount of money for doing somewhat tedious things with peers to staying home, deciding on what chores to do themselves, and feeling vaguely bad about the outcomes.
I ought to clean a bunch of surfaces in my house and cut back some weeds that are still there from last fall. Instead perhaps we will buy a couple of cottonwood trees and plant them, because it's way more satisfying of the trees manage to survive and grow. There's also a dead fruit tree to cut down, but I feel entitled to not do that, as the pregnant woman in the family.
Gaashk
3d ago
Whenever the topic of tradwives and fertility comes up, my first thought is, what do the women on this board think?
Grew up in a very trad wife centric Christian homeschool subculture. It mostly didn't work out. Mostly, we had to get jobs. It isn't trivially easy to find a man who's prepared to be a husband, father, and primary earner fairly young, willing to ask girls out, often at venues like church functions, and interested in those girls. There are some, sure, and some families were formed that way. But now in our late 30s, I'm hearing about even some of the women who did marry a traditional head of household man divorcing, because he's pushy, unpleasant, domineering, and re-training as a nurse or something, now with several children.
Marriages don't have to rise to the level of beating to be worse than working a lower middle class female job. If my now husband hadn't kept inviting me on romantic dates at ancient castles, I would still be basically content with being single, because being a single woman in the modern world is really just fine, with a long educated Anglophone tradition full of slightly lonely but basically fine governesses and nuns. Even at the standards of a century ago, I would certainly rather be a nun than marry a man I didn't like, of whom people said "well at least he doesn't beat you, just have more grit."
I am not a feminist by current standards. My grandmothers and great grandmothers went to teaching colleges, and followed their husbands around the world while they translated Mayan carvings or something, and returned to teaching when their children where older. They kept copies of Virginia Woolf in their houses. There are great grandmothers I don't know much about, because their children ran away from home (and first marriages, I think?) and met up on a Pacific island, and then went on to have those 3-4 kids together, and raise them while teaching. I don't know how to evaluate the alternate universe where everyone had more grit, sticking out their first marriage on some frozen windswept cattle ranch.
Much is made of the state of family formation in Asia lately. Chinese great grandmothers probably had too much grit, breaking their daughters' feet to help their marriage prospects. I don't know how things were for the great grandmothers of the current generation of South Korean women -- the educational issues there sound like an excess of grit -- everyone could just not cram that extra hour, and things would likely be just the same, but slightly more pleasant. It sounds very zero sum after a pretty baseline educational level and some research skills.
Anyway, I'm pregnant with a third baby because I don't think being not particularly successful in America is that bad, actually. Probably none of my kids will go to an unusually excellent college or have an unusually excellent job or win at a high level competition, and that's alright. Someone came in to my classroom today to say that she's pleased that her daughter is shift manager at a Starbucks and leading literacy tutoring over the summer. This is good! People should be able to be pleased with their children living normal, functional lives!
Gaashk
1d ago
Fact is that most boomers enjoy working around the house. Fixing up odds and ends and getting a perfect green lawn are hobbies not chores.
Or they move to Phoenix and get one of those yards with gravel and river rocks winding their way around cacti, and a community pool, and only have to work on it twice a year.
Gaashk
15hr ago
Are there large cacti? Mesquite? Creosote? Palm trees? Juniper?
There are people growing North African oasis style gardens in that climate, with citrus, olives, and date palms (best example at https://www.goglobaltoday.com/st-anthonys-greek-orthodox-monastery.html). But that takes a long time, a lot of work, and a good well.
Hasn't it only been about 5 years now that society has been worried about population collapse?
My mother remembers Population Bomb rhetoric when she was younger. Google says China only ended their one child policy in 2016. The trends are probably just moving too fast. If you tell a whole generation they're destroying the world by having children, it surely takes some time to pull that back with "we didn't mean you, women who were already having 2.5 children! We meant the Nigerian ones having 7 children in desperate poverty! (But, also, global warming is a very terrible disaster, you should feel bad)"
I think the Christian perspective is something like that marriage is hard, but it's alright to ask hard things of people. Traditional cultures also ask people to do things like serve in the military, fast, and stand multiple hours for public ceremonies. Orthodox churches have crowns instead of vows, and one of the several symbols involved is "crowns of martyrdom." Is staying married to an angry, unpleasant man and bearing his children as hard an ask as fighting in a war? I don't know, I've never done either, but maybe it is! And if we have a norm of people in general never needing to do hard things, it isn't surprising that the same would be true of marriages.
Gaashk
3d ago
Things like toys and clothes aren't that expensive in rich countries. Time and personal attention are. The main upfront cost is not having the freedom to go do adult things without a babysitter, and having to plan everything around the children. It's a sunk cost, and the second child might play with the first, slightly lowering the attention burden at some point in the future. On the other hand, if the parents are paying for daycare, that adds up very quickly, and to have a fourth child, parents have to change vehicle class, which is not just expensive, but can also be quite inconvenient.
Gaashk
3d ago
Or perhaps by convincing their men to actually treat them well?
If the rumors of (for instance) the Black community are remotely true, then, yes, it's better to be dependent on the US government, despite its flaws.
Gaashk
3d ago
I think someone can get a job as a landscaper around here just by asking. One acquaintance (with a MFA fwiw) is working as a handyman by mostly just asking around, which seems to be going alright. I haven't noticed anyone really having a problem with those kinds of jobs around here, or anyone complaining about getting them, either. It's the jobs by which a man can be the main earner for his family, and his wife can afford to take a few years off to be with the young children that are the issue.
Gaashk
3d ago
I think it has something to do with scarring from multiple c-sections, and longer recovery time. My mother said that one of the big reasons she never had a third child was because the first was a c-section, and at the time they just automatically recommended it for subsequent births, and then the second was harder to recover from and she didn't want to do it again.
Gaashk
3d ago
on a slightly related note, I've heard stories from mothers where the doctors basically decided to do a cesarean because the labor was taking too long and the doctor didn't want to stick around.
Yeah, my state has gone back to a midwives by default, call a doctor if necessary protocol, even in the hospitals, because of that kind of thing.
Gaashk
4d ago
Yes, these takes do come across as fairly "boo outgroup." I can see them not being accepted as top level posts. Perhaps you would enjoy Kiwi Farms?
Gaashk
7d ago
#2 -- I would recommend trying something more like a farmer's market for this, vs literal checkout lines. Trying to strike up a conversation at a supermarket is in itself a faux pas, actual friends and colleagues barely acknowledge each other there. Bookshops and hobby stores are better. Handcraft markets and galleries with event nights are good -- there are people (probably skewed towards women, which is good in this context) just milling around for the atmosphere, open to a short conversation that probably won't lead anywhere. It is basically normal to just wander around talking to vendors or saying things about the items and not buying all that much.
Gaashk
7d ago
It depends.
My husband and I are both high openness introverts, who are now raising high openness introvert children. One of the children did spontaneously strike up a conversation in the check out line today with a little kid sitting in a cart. On the other hand, the response rate for cute little girls smiling and waving at a store is something like 1/20, and I would expect for a non charismatic grown man to be significantly worse (and occasionally actually negative, whereas for the kids it's at worst neutral), so that's a pretty low value situation.
The strategy of just showing up somewhere and seeing if anyone looks friendly works pretty well, even for introverts. Either way, we'll have seen a thing, wandered around, and that's fine. Or maybe there is someone friendly there, and that's even more interesting! Lots of people all over the place are more outgoing than we are, so we've had a lot of interesting experiences this way. We just have to go take a nap afterwards. But we are all very high Openness in the Big 5 sense, so ymmv.
Gaashk
3d ago
Looks up relevant laws.
Well, I'm still not buying another vehicle, so will apparently just have to live in mild violation of the law for a year and a half.
Gaashk
15d ago
The "yaslighting" thing is cute.
It seems like a case where something can be good enough advice at an individual level, while also not being very useful systemically, or in a way that's relevant for fertility rates. To the extent that a trend is effecting America, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, etc, it's unlikely to be primarily a matter of personal or subcultural choice.
Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.
Maybe they are themselves mediocre? Not everyone, nor every job can be above average. Thinking of that as a harm is a large part of the problem. A civilization where people won't have kids because their house and job and man are average is not in a good place.
Bad Therapy is largely about that kind of thing. The premise is that there are always risks to any intervention, and when the target audience isn't suffering from debilitating mental illness, the risks outweigh the benefits.
My father experienced something similar with his sister, due to a "repressed memories" therapist.
The identity preference ratchet is something else, though, from what I've heard. Something more like Marxist class warfare, but for identity groups. Cain and Able, Kulaks, misdirected Leviathan, that kind of thing.
There might sometimes be a steel man for people to use HR scary words about discrimination and toxic environments when they really just have kind of a shitty manager who's bad at managing or something. As far as I can tell, unless it's absurdly obvious and well documented, if an employee complains that their manager is bad at their managing job, they will be met with disinterest, possibly irritation towards them, rather than the manager. Perhaps they will get in trouble for wanting clear directives or trying to enforce their own boundaries in the face of the shitty manager at some point. They will probably not get a better manager. If they go on about HR scare words, on the other hand, the company will go out of its way to protect them from reprisal, and they might actually get put under someone else. That's a win for the employee! So that's what they're incentivized to do.
Gaashk
15d ago
The workers at my local Costco always seemed noticeably polite and efficient, especially compared to the neighboring Sam's Club workers, so they're probably earning it.
Working in schools has good hours, good breaks, decent benefits if they decide to become full time teachers, the same hours as your kids if they end up having kids, very portable if you decide to move, and school stabbings are quite rare almost everywhere, especially ones involving staff members and their non-gang affiliated kids.
Gaashk
3d ago
Three to four can be bigger than two to three, because that's when you have to buy a mini van, at least. Or one of those huge extra row SUVs, but it's pretty difficult to access kids in the back row to help with buckles and whatnot.
Gaashk
15d ago
I feel very confused by the way this is often talked about.
Women need jobs for the same reason men need jobs. Hardly anyone marries a well-off man at 18. It's not really an available choice for that many women, even in very conservative communities where it's theoretically ideal. Someone might say that they can go be a waitress or barista or something at 18, and sure, that's not that bad. But then unless both partners have really bought into the homeschooling lifestyle, most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do? Running a non-profit for fun is for the rich, and costs money. and it's not great to be a waitress at 50. Maybe some women can take 10 years off to raise young kids, but there's another 30 years or so there where most of them will have to work, or face resentment and very tight finances. And for what? Lots of leisure is only enjoyable if you have money or similarly situated friends and neighbors.
Gaashk
11d ago
I think this year's viruses may just be like that. The same thing is happening to a decent number of kids as well, of varying health and activity levels.
Gaashk
16d ago
Yeah.
Also, in my circles "self care" has mostly been co-opted by non-self actors to try to get people to do what they want them to. People do not take a personal day off of work for "self care," but rather to do a thing that they like. The people talking about self care in those words are the ones running restorative justice circles, pastors talking about "prayer and fasting as self care," an employer pushing "we all need to practice self care! Call this number for a free telephone therapy session" (presumably as an alternative to taking a half day off to see a real therapist, or asking for better working conditions). Now when I hear it I think the speaker is trying to get me to replace my actual preferences with something they consider better or more virtuous.
Gaashk
20d ago
That's only managerial class and above Americans. Plenty of Americans have kids while renting, even in smallish apartments.
Gaashk
11d ago
My kids and I have all had the same colds and flus this year, and their's are about equal severity, but we are at three separate elementary schools and daycares this year, and I hear it's very normal for that situation. We are the vectors that allow the viruses to travel between otherwise unrelated communities.
(I like scrub desert more than average, so others may feel differently)
For other people, yes, because the glare is significantly increased. I suppose it wouldn't make much of a difference farther from the roads, but it also seems like there would be a significant cost connecting to the grid from farther away. I'm in favor of the solar panels for individual houses, schools, military bases, and so on, and it seems promising for places with long electrical connections that are currently maintained for fairly small neighborhoods. If the plan is for the family settlement to generate solar power and use it for their AC or something, that isn't a problem.
Wind farms are unsightly, visible from extremely far away, and kill a fair number of birds.
It's possible that both ventures are still worth it in some situations, but probably not in the case of an amateur landlord who is wondering about putting a shrimp farm in a desert with uncertain water sources.
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