Thank you for the effortpost

Starting with the US: a very significant amount of the labor was unaccounted completely in the official statistics. In a family of 4, if the father worked the fields registered as an agricultor while his wife and children "helped" him, this was accounted only as one worker, where de-facto there were four workers.

This vibes with something I could never quite put words to, even in the modern day: if agricultural work is really so rare, why is it that SO many people I know worked on the farm when they were growing up? I'm sure there's some selection bias from living in a large midwest city. But those cities are filled with young people who grew up on a farm and spent their afternoons and weekends doing chores (e.g., actual farm work), and then got out of that lifestyle as soon as they could.

First and foremost, a huge factor is climate. The climate in the grain-growing steppes of the former USSR is much more unreliable, with shorter growing seasons, colder weather, and a larger variability in rainfall compared to the temperate grain-growing regions of the USA.

The USA has so much EZ-mode arable land, it always seems unfair to compare it's output to... anywhere else, really.

It is simply incomprehensible to people like me from the capitalist west to imagine a rural life rich in arts, healthcare, education, culture, sports and entertainment. Practically every town with above a few thousand inhabitants had a "Дом культуры" (dom kultury, culture house) vibrant with poetry clubs, art classes, theater companies... Children also could enjoy an immense amount of positive activities by belonging to the communist youths of the pioneers and the komsomol, so they weren't isolated in their homes as American children are (even in cities)

I'll have to read more about this, it seems like a good model for how to make rural life enriching. I think a lot of the reactionary attitudes we get from rural areas mainly come from how hollowed-out the society has become.