What is it with nurses and farms?

Some conjecture as inspired by April Smith

Pictured: Nothing to be ashamed of, unless you maybe do it in front of world leaders.

This is a repost of a lengthy comment (comments of mine that go beyond “fuck you, you piece of shit, I hope something nasty eats you” usually approach article length) in a previous post.

As I mention in that post (and lean heavily into for my photos, until I can take some new ones) I live on a farm. This is a fairly recent development, but one I’ve been preparing for, mentally and skills-wise, for years. It was the pandemic response that pushed my family to make the move sooner than later- mostly me, which is something I’ll surely write about eventually. My husband grew up on a farmstead built by his parents- they moved away in his teen years wanting him to be less isolated, which didn’t help in making him less weird, but the experience left an impression on him, and so the farm life was a surprisingly easy sell.

As is frequently the case lately, when I mentioned I was on a farm, lots of people chimed in with “ohhhh, I wanna do that too!” Someone observed that this sentiment seems to be shared by a lot of nurses.

Now, this could just have statistical clustering written all over it- most people will probably arrive at my substack and similar ones to talk about COVID-19, a population that includes a LOT of very frustrated healthcare professionals- but I’ve noticed it too.

I took a stab at guessing at some reasons why the life pastoral might hold particular appeal for nurses- having known a lot of them, I had a few ideas.

- Nurses are, or have become, very comfortable dealing with things that are dirty and smell "bad." Having to be around the smell of animals, manure, poop, fertilizer, and other things rarely smelled in The City are not seen as being very onerous parts of the job.

- Nurses (IMHO, more than doctors) become very close to the rhythms of life and death. The farm life is a constant reminder, sometimes unpleasant, of the inexorability of life and death: animals get sick or injured and are put down, animals give birth to cute babies, miscarry, and eat their young; virtually any plant or animal on a farm can become diseased, etc. These are the sorts of things that make a typical person shy away from the environment; a nurse is already inured to it.

Pictured: the sow that did NOT eat its offspring alive this year.

-Nurses (again, IMHO, more than doctors) do a lot more physical work during the course of a day; running around, lifting and moving, fetching and holding, etc. They've learned from experience that this aspect of a job, if it includes it, can be invigorating and joyful.

- Farm life is indisputably peaceful; it is very, very often amazingly quiet and still here, and when your lifestock is content and happy, there is a calm silence that pervades everything. Many nurses long for that as they're often lucky to experience even 5 minutes of it in a typical day on the floor.

- Farm life is much more self-driven than healthcare, even when you become an administrator; I think nurses and many other HCP's long for the ability to do things their way, on their time. There is very little tolerance for individual judgment and responsibility; protocol and practice are the order of the day. Farming is scientific, but it is also very artful, and every farm is run uniquely by the people that own it.

Well, that was the original comment. How did I do? Nurses and otherwise, does this resonate with you?