Yes, pretty much this. If they worked in the fields 12 hour per day as in a Victorian industrial setting, they would have perished from exposure, not having time to attend obligatory work around the house and to process the food and materials used to make food. Basically peasants worked all the time to maintain a level of "comfort" like in the article's picture:
https://i0.wp.com/juliawise.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/S...Also idealization of rural life and past rural life tends to come almost exclusively from city dwellers, basically people who never set foot in a rural area let alone grow or live there.
I grew up in rural Romania and even though the conditions were (and are) exponentially better than what the non-industrial non-mechanized non-chemical (herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers) past offered, all I thought growing up was get the funk out of there. Agriculture (and it's relatives, animal husbandry) sucks and I hate it! :)
And without mechanization it's incredibly labor intensive to tend to a farm. Just to keep the animals alive over winter you have to dry and deposit a lot of hay, but before that you gotta scythe it. Scything is no walk in the park and basically you gotta do a lot of that every day to cover enough area to keep the cattle fed. Then plowing without a tractor and using animals: not just dangerous but backbreaking work. Then hoeing the weeds, funking need to do it all the time because without herbicides, the weeds grow everywhere and by the time you "finished" going once over all crops, they've grown back where you first started. At some point my father had this fantasy of what is now called "organic" crops, in fact cheapskating at paying the price for herbicides, so I did so much hoeing that it got out of my nose. I don't recall me saying it but my mother told me that at some point in a middle of a potatoes hoeing session I said that I'd rather solve 1000 math problems than do even just another row of potatoes. Definitive moment in my career choice, which is a lot closer to solving math problems now than hoeing organic potatoes :)
