What Does a Crofter Do? [Updated}

A nice post at Musings from a Stonehead describing what a crofter (small farmer) does: walk and carry. He's not walking behind horses, but the farm is small enough not to need a riding tractor.  That's one reason old time farmers had no problems with their weight.

Meanwhile, just to prove small farms are the same on both sides of the Atlantic, StonyBrookFarm has a post about the concept of "cool boredom", which he sees as part of doing chores on a farm:

Lugging around water buckets, wheeling out bales of hay, standing still and running the hose for ten minutes to fill a fifty gallon water trough, walking from pasture to pasture, paddock to paddock, barnyard to barnyard, following a rote routine multiple times a day, day after day, are the stuff for me of cool boredom on the farm.

Both posts are worth reading in their entirety.