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Writer's pictureJennifer Eaker

WHAT IS A FARM WIFE REALLY WORTH?


Oh Honey Child did you pick the WRONG momma to irritate today! I will admit that this is a total rant so if you would prefer, skip it, but for those of you who decide to continue BUCKLE UP! First of all, did any of your own mothers teach you the rule “ if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”? Apparently not otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here typing this. I tried to ignore it, I really did, but there is a time to be silent and a time to speak and apparently today is the day! As most of you know recently my husband and I adopted our five beautiful children after almost 6 years of foster care. ( I couldn’t carry a child due to medical complications so this is how my husband and I decided to make our family so lets not jump on the adoption/birth band wagon today!) In the many photo dumps that have occurred on the web since their adoption we made the comments of how we appreciate our “village” and how they have helped us in more ways than possible to help us raise our family. The comments on those posts ranged from the super supportive to the downright rude. Its those rude comments I want to address now. Most of those people have been removed from our feed however they rubbed me the wrong way so here we go. There was a small group of commenters who posted “ there is no such thing as a village” another group said “ the village concept is a joke no one is really there for you’ and my absolute favorite “ you shouldn’t need a village, if you couldn’t do it on your own then you had no business taking on five kids” . Did these people just wake up on the wrong side of the bed or get pushed out of it? Maybe people just don’t understand exactly what a “village” is. A “village” is a small community in a rural area. It’s a bunch of individuals who come together to make their little area the best that it can be. That is what we have for our children. A lot of people have them. Sometimes it is just family, other times just friends. It doesn’t matter what you call it its still there. You know the people who help you in day to day life. For example the grandmother who babysits free of charge to get to spend time with her grandchildren. ( my kids have never been to a sitter in the six years they have been in my care. They always prefer grandma’s). How about the grandpas that loan us the truck to get wood to build the things at home that save our sanity. (Thank God for the swing set that keeps the kids entertained). How about the bus driver who if I was in a really bad jam would actually take the child with them after school till I could pick them up. What about the lady at church who sits next to your disabled son and helps to keep him playing quietly so you can focus on the other kiddos or by some miracle even the service?! She has had to empty her pockets on Sunday afternoon to make sure matchbox cars don’t go threw her washer. How about the Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, honorary, adopted or otherwise who take one or two of your children on occasion at the drop of a hat just because you need a break. What about the pastor who gives you council for those times where you are questioning your faith as you try to navigate being a parent. These are all people of our village. We couldn’t do it without them. And the bonus is that our children get to see how a community can work together to make the world just a little bit better. That gives us hope for the future. So before you come at us with your “ there is no village” comments maybe you should look in the mirror and see if YOU are the problem with your village.

Now with the village issue addressed lets address the comments of “ stay at home mothers or parents”. That was the other side of the rude comments. Those commenters started with “ but you are a stay at home mom, taking care of the kids should be easy” , and “ you became a stay at home mother because of the money you get from those kids now you don’t have to work” and my favorite “ stay at home mothers sit on their backsides all day and do nothing, the more kids you have the more money you get from the government” . First of all the money you get from the government sucks. If you are providing the children with what they really need then there is seriously NO money to be made. It is our job as parents regardless of how we became parents to give our child or children the best that we can. So money has absolutely NOTHING to do with it. Also I agree that there are some mothers who do sit on their backside and do nothing, but those are few and far between. The majority of stay at home mothers or parents do so much more. They actually do more than the common 9-5 job person . This is not just me blowing hot air. This has actually been proven. To prove my point I am actually going to break it down.

Please remember as I do this that I consider myself a “Farm Wife”. No we don’t have a million acres, but we do have more than just the pet dog. We have goats, pigs, horses, cows, chickens, ducks. We raise and harvest our own hay and on occasion crops. We plant a ridiculously large garden to cook and can with and we harvest our own meat from our own animals. All this together seems to put us in the “farmer or homesteader” category. For those of you who don’t fall into this area , delete the parts that don’t fit and go from there. Please also remember that I identify as a woman so therefore the rest of this post will be from my point of view as a “wife”. These numbers could easily be transferred to any individual not just women. With that being said…..

WHAT IS A STAY AT HOME FARM WIFE WORTH?

The following is based on average cost per hour in 2021 ( I’m not even doing the current year!) I am fully aware that the prices that are being listed are not the actual prices people are paid per hour it is literally an AVERAGE that I am showing. Due to the fact that so many people are unaware of what an actual average is or the actual definition of an average I am going to say this which comes from the Webster dictionary, an average is a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data in particular the mode median or most commonly the mean which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number. This means you take all the numbers add them together divide by the number of numbers you added and that is your average.

 A Hired Hand: Helping husband with farm or ranch tasks require at least 10 hours per week. Figuring a pay rate of $13.94 an hour the annual wage is $7,248.80.

A Nurse: Keeping the entire family in good health takes one hour per week. Figuring a pay rate of $36.91 per hour for one year, that ends up being approximately $1919.32. That is based on an LPN wage. If you were to base it off of an RN which most people have to be now in order to be considered a nurse with a pay rate of $44.80 an hour the annual wage would be $2332.72. Let us also not forget all of the so-called overtime that would happen during flu season, allergy season, and all the medical issues that happened today with people in general. I am not even going to add that in.

A Child Raiser: This particular category falls underneath the subcategories of daycare workers or babysitters and those types of jobs. Since I am a stay at home mom that means me. So a child raiser raising children on the farm based on two children per family takes approximately 50 hours per week. At a pay rate of $10 to $25 an hour based on how expensive a normal babysitter could possibly be, the average salary would end up being $26,000 to $65,000 dollars per year.

A Gardener: growing your own food and keeping the yard looking nice takes an average of six hours per week paying a rate of approximately $20.33 per hour the average salary ends up being approximately $6342.96 a year.

An Interior Decorator: the typical farm wife spends one hour per week trying to make the house a better place to live. I am fully aware that not everybody does this but this is something that I do for my family therefore I am putting it in. At an average pay rate of $26.19 per hour the average salary is $1361.88.

A Secretary or Bookkeeper: doing the paperwork for the farming operation averages out to be approximately 8 hours per week. A secretary at a pay rate of $33.83 per hour makes the annual wage being approximately $14,073.28. A bookkeeper that the pay rate of $24.52 per hour makes the annual wage being approximately $10,200.32. Some people lump those two jobs into one category but to make it completely fair I'm putting both figures.

A Chauffeur: hauling children and running errands for the husband amounts to approximately 7 hours per week. This is based on only staying in the general area nowadays there are so many specialists in faraway towns like Buffalo in my case that would actually add some hours on to this but in general just for the running around town errands at a rate of $26.12 per hour makes the annual wage approximately $9507.68. Today is not the day to even talk about gas prices but just keep that in mind not to mention the wear and tear on said vehicle which also cost an arm and a leg and two kidneys.

A Cook: For a family of four the typical farm wife spends approximately 14 hours a week preparing meals. These are not freezer meals unless of course they are freezer meals that she made beforehand and froze herself. These are meals that are cooked from scratch with as little purchase of groceries from the store as possible. They are normally healthy nutritious meals that are 10 times better than the crap you buy at the store that has more chemicals than actual food. At an average pay rate of $17.54 per hour the annual wage would be $12,769.12.

A Maintenance Worker: this category might possibly have some argument attached to it. Some people believe that it is a man's job and I use the term man lightly, to take care of the maintenance of the home. Let's be completely honest folks if you are working on a farm you know just as well as I do that the chances of the poor man having a second to himself to help move furniture in the house or repair a leaky faucet is slim to none. He is busy doing whatever he needs to do out on the farm therefore these small maintenance jobs fall to the person who is taking care of the house in this case me. I have spent more time learning how to wire an outlet or change a faucet or repair a leak or repair a TV then I ever spent on learning how to cook clean and keep house. So for the sake of argument let's just add a maintenance worker as one of the many hats a farm wife would have. At an hourly rate of $23.63 for approximately two hours a week, the average salary would end being $2457.52 per year.

A Veterinarian: again another category that might cause argument. All of my life when it comes to the sick calf, or the sick piglet or the egg bound chicken, nine times out of 10 it is the wife that ends up taking care of said sick animal. I am not saying that the man, in this case my husband or my brother has never ever taken care of a sick animal because they have, but the farm wife, sister ,woman, depending on whom you are talking to at the time and her so-called “special touch” on animal health takes approximately 3 hours per week at an average pay of $49 per hour the average salary would be $7644 per year.

A Dishwasher, Housekeeper, and Laundress: some people lump these three individuals into one category. In all fairness I am going to break it down into three. These jobs together take approximately 28 hours per week. A dishwasher on average makes $10.19 per hour. A housekeeper on average makes $20.62. A laundress makes approximately $14.72 an hour. If you add those three numbers together you get $45.53. Using that number as the average pay rate the average wage ends up being $66,291.68 per year.

A Dietician: some people would put the term dietician underneath the cook category. But over time it has come to my attention that planning meals for the entire family that meet all of the dietary needs for all individuals including special diets ends up being approximately 3 hours per week.. At a pay rate of approximately $40.82 per hour the average salary would end up being $6367.92 per year.

A Food Buyer: Again some people would list this underneath the cook category or possibly the dietitian category but in all honesty I personally believe that it deserves its own category. It takes most women, approximately 2 hours per week to buy for the family unless you are like me and only go shopping on a monthly basis and even that is if I have no choice in the matter. Figuring a pay rate of approximately $14.00 per hour the wage ends up being $1456 for the year.

When you total up all of the numbers above, that is the so-called salary the typical farmer or ranch wife earns in a year's time. In this case that is approximately $173,847.15 per year. Please take into account that math is not my strongest subject, so I hope I did all of it right. Looking at it another way, the typical farm wife earns approximately $3343.21 per week. Now to compute what she's brought to your farm operation multiply $3343.21 times the 52 weeks in a year times the number of years you have been married. Even without adding in her love, care, and devotion, all priceless items, the farm wife is still the best so-called bargain in rural America.

So the next time someone takes a jab at the whole stay at home parent deal and asks me “ what do you do all day?” my response is going to be……

“ After a night of blissful slumber enhanced by the symphony of the human chainsaw in the bed next to me, I leisurely awoke when the alarm went off at 5:00 AM…….” Followed by, the story of how I have to wake my husband , multiple times, wake the children from the sleep coma’s that the atomic bomb can not wake them from, get them out of their pj’s , make their beds, wake the husband for another time and get him out the door on time, make breakfast, argue about the breakfast I cooked, clean up the table , get coats hats, mittens, boots on , find the missing shoes, pack the clarinet that is always forgotten, get kids on the bus, followed by the lovely list I wrote above, and ending with, “ you are right I didn’t do anything all day and yet I am doing the job of a six figure salary. Can you say the same?”

Seriously people, stay at home parents work just as hard if not harder than a working parent and let's take into account that most parents are not stay at home parents. There are parents who do everything that I listed above and then turn around and work a 40 hour a week full time job at minimum wage. I give those people my utmost respect because at the end of the day working just my 10 hours a week that I work in a job outside of the home and doing everything that I said above, when my head hits the pillow I'm out for the count. It is sad to know that in today's age an individual needs to do everything that I listed plus work a full time job plus another part time job just to make ends meet because the cost of living is so astronomically high. There is no time left for a family to be a family. Family game nights which should happen on a weekly basis or a family meal or a family get together or something like that don't happen because they don't have the time to make it happen. The reality is that unfortunately we as American people are so busy making a life that we don't have time to live it. I understand that there are some people who work their backsides off to make what they have worth having, but in the same breath there are those people who don't take care of their families, who don't take care of their property and they live in rat infested disgusting homes, who don't take an interest in their kids likes dislikes such as football or cheer practice. Those people who seemed to put forth the minimal effort seemed to be making out just as well as those who do it all and turn around and drive a minivan so they can take their kids, the neighbors kids, and their neighbors kids, to soccer practice, provide the snack and still be there to cheer each and every one of their kids. If you lump the people who do the minimum together and the people who do it all together the scale tips horribly in favor of the minimum. That is not right and in my personal opinion that is what is wrong with the majority of America today. Our government hands so much to everybody that the effort that people used to do of having the nice house and the nice yard and the pretty flower beds and the home cooked meals is not worth it. If you really and truly think about it if families did everything that I listed as a family and everything else that needs to be done as a family the family members would be too busy to be causing the brawls and the robbery and the drugs, and the alcohol that is destroying our world for our children. Walt Disney said it best, “Our greatest natural resource is in the minds of our children”. If we do not teach our children how to be hard working they won't be. If we do not teach our children the skills that they will need in their future such as cooking, cleaning, banking, they will not know how to do it when they are adults. You don't have to be a farmer's wife or a stay at home mom to be something worth being. Even someone who lives in a penthouse apartment in the middle of New York City can be something more then just the stockbroker or just the grocer or just the banker. I might be what is considered a stay at home mom or a stay at home farmer's wife but I am proud of that title. Not because of the monetary value that is put to it according to the figures, but because I know my family is taken care of. My children will be able to survive without me and they will not be counting on somebody else to take care of them. My sons will know how to cook and clean and sew just like my daughters so they can be a partner to their future partners and not a burden . My daughters we'll learn how to be the maintenance person and how to be someone who can change their own oil so they will never be dependent on a man. They will be as independent as they can be so that way they are a partner to their partners in the future instead of a hindrance. There is absolutely no reason that every human being on this planet be it male female nonbinary furry, it doesn't matter they are capable of being more than just a body on the planet. Maybe if more people were given a hand up instead of a handout our world would be better for it. I know that this was a rant and some people will not read it and that is OK. I know that the views that I have pointed out are not necessarily everybody's views. They are my opinion with the exception of the monetary figures which I did do the research and they are factual. We are responsible for our actions on this planet, and the effects, or irresponsible harm that we create through our presence, no matter what they are. History has left us an undeniable record showing that whatever we leave behind unresolved would not only still be here for generations to come, meaning our children and children’s children, but they may and quite possibly will create additional problems for those who are to follow. I'm going to end this rant with a proverb that I wish more people would actually listen to. We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, We borrow it from our children.

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