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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFAFO story of the day: Carrie Underwood can't find hired hands to help her with the ranch.
Carrie Underwood Struggling With Leading a ‘Far From Idyllic’ Life on Tennessee Farm: Source
Owning a farm was a no-brainer for Carrie Underwood, who grew up on one in Checotah, Okla. A self-described green thumb, the country star, 42, lives on 400 acres with her husband, former NHL player Mike Fisher, and their two young sons in Tennessee.
But a source tells Star the constant grind of farm life is beginning to wear on the “Before He Cheats” singer.
“It’s become too much for her to maintain, and she’s getting no sleep because she’s up at the crack of dawn taking care of all these animals,” says the insider of the chickens, horses and sheep on the property, which also includes fruit trees, a greenhouse and multiple gardens.
“She’s shoveling hay, weeding, fertilizing, harvesting, and then there are the repairs that never end.” It doesn’t help that she’s had a hard time finding and keeping hired hands, says the insider.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/carrie-underwood-struggling-leading-far-203002014.html
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doc03
(38,330 posts)care of my 400 acres. Maybe pay them more then?
marble falls
(67,980 posts)
AltairIV
(952 posts)Lady that's called work. Most of us have experience with this, apparently you do not.
hatrack
(63,455 posts)There's a Leopards Ate My Face thread on this, and the comments are . . . .admirably direct.
Carrie Underwood then:
Carrie Underwood now:
tanyev
(47,694 posts)
Raven123
(6,987 posts)Underwood’s situation doesn’t remotely approach that of Thompson, the subject of that photo.
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/08/woman-famous-great-depression-photograph/
yardwork
(67,854 posts)Carrie Underwood and her NFL husband aren't hurting got money. I doubt she's up at dawn doing all that hard work.
A contrasting photo of a hard working farmer would make that argument.
leftstreet
(37,081 posts)She was never claiming to have been hard-working. She HIRED hard workers. Now she couldn't find them and considered herself a victim
The photo is a woman who actually was both hard working and a victim
Raven123
(6,987 posts)Carrie’s upbringing in Oklahoma played a significant role in shaping her values. She learned the importance of hard work and self-sufficiency from a young age. Helping her parents with chores instilled in her a strong work ethic. These lessons have carried over into her adult life, influencing her parenting style and daily routines. She believes it is essential for children to understand the value of effort. “I think it’s so important for kids to see that everything doesn’t come easily,” she explains.
I think she does claim to be hard-working.
https://usnewsper.com/2025/07/carrie-underwoods-farm-life-simple-tips-for-sustainable-living/
Paladin
(31,528 posts)
Tetrachloride
(8,919 posts)GoCubsGo
(34,257 posts)Maybe sell your private jet, and offer to pay a some people a decent wage with the proceeds, you whiny, little cheapskate. I'm sure you'd find plenty of help that way. And, it' s not like your POS husband didn't make tens of millions playing hockey...
Got to wonder how much of this is a "We treat our employees like shit" thing. And, word got out about that...
Javaman
(64,438 posts)
SocialDemocrat61
(5,555 posts)That could be a factor.
twodogsbarking
(15,481 posts)
modrepub
(3,918 posts)Tends to make things disappear. Have heard many stories about house keepers taking things. If these folks were properly compensated maybe they wouldn’t be taking five finger discounts on your stuff.
twodogsbarking
(15,481 posts)Put some jeans on and get yer skinny ass out in the field.
chicoescuela
(2,272 posts)Duppers
(28,413 posts)And here's proof to me that she's a decent person:
"If you told me I could never be around animals again, I would just die."
In April 2022, Underwood shared the loss of her dog, Ace, whom she had adopted in 2007.
Ten months later, Underwood shared she had adopted a new dog, named Charlie, who she met backstage while touring in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In April 2013, Underwood spoke out with disapproval regarding the Tennessee "Ag Gag bill".
The bill makes it a crime to videotape animal cruelty or abuse and then fail to turn in the evidence to authorities within 48 hours. This is to stop animal rights activists from accumulating enough documentation to prove that animal cruelty is routine in big agribusiness.
Underwood tweeted, "Shame on TN lawmakers for passing the Ag Gag bill. If Gov. Bill Haslam signs this, he needs to expect me at his front door. Who's with me?"
State Rep. Andy Holt responded to her tweet, saying, "I would say that Carrie Underwood will stick to singing, I'll stick to lawmaking."
Underwood later responded via Twitter, "I should stick to singing? Wow...sorry, I'm just a tax-paying citizen concerned for the safety of my family."
Quoted from:
Nashville Scene. Archived from the original on April 26, 2013. Retrieved April 22, 2013.
__________
I'm damn disappointed in Andy Holt (Jr).
I thought his dad was a nice person (sat behind him once many decades ago in the Tennessee Theater on Gay Street. We had a nice conversation.)
But Andy, Jr. can just go to hell ❗❗
twodogsbarking
(15,481 posts)Duppers
(28,413 posts)She's trash then❗
Thanks for enlightening me!!
twodogsbarking
(15,481 posts)
Farmer-Rick
(12,018 posts)It's called managing a farm. Though mostly small farmers do what she describes and not farmers of 400 acres.
She needs to hire a farm manager, if she can't keep up with the work. i wonder why she has a hard time finding and keeping workers. Did pedo Trump take all her immigrant labor? Are the remaining workers not willing to work for low wages? Is she snotty and rude to her hired help? Just makes you wonder.
LeftInTX
(33,566 posts)Maybe she should just convert more to acreage and/or sell part of it.
Sounds like she has a variety of "gardens" as opposed to monocrop farm.
I know people are bashing her, but it sounds like she created this "ideal dream family farm" with a huge variety of gardens, fruit trees and greenhouses.
Sounds like she has a variety of animals too.
It sounds like she created a farm "like it should be", but it's probably alot more work than rows and rows of corn.
She probably needs to pay them more and needs to hire more people, but I wonder if people get there and go, "What should I do first?" and but if she's the type that likes to do everything herself, it's gonna making hiring people more difficult.
This isn't a case of someone who needs migrant workers to harvest rows of crops and can't find cheap migrants because Trump is deporting everyone. She's not trying to turn a profit. It's a case of someone who's trying to do "too much" herself. She needs specialized help. Someone for the greenhouse. Someone for the orchards etc etc...
But who knows? She also is still performing and still wearing plenty of make up etc.
This is a fluff story more than anything.
https://news.amomama.com/452354-inside-carrie-underwoods-farm-where-she.html
I think she said she had 35 varieties of tomatoes?
"Can you please cross pollinate these? Maybe we can create a different variety".
"My goal is to not buy food from the store anymore," the Grammy Award winner stated, emphasizing her commitment to homegrown produce. While she fully embraced this way of living, she admitted that her sons, Isaiah and Jacob Fisher, were still hesitant.
&t=841s&ab_channel=Dr.JoshAxe
marble falls
(67,980 posts)... that bread.
Botany
(75,189 posts)She is a Trumper I wish her pain.
haele
(14,545 posts)Unlike the YouTube TradLife type influencer farms.
The old English Country Manor farms or Colonial farmsteads typically ran a quarter system of land management; 3/4 of the "farm" was business, and 1/4 (typically 10 - 20 acres) was for the family food sources.
My 3x Grandparents ran a local general store supporting their local farming community of around 10 families, including their parent's farm; they also had a small sustainment plot in their 2 acre backyard for chickens (rich folks had chickens in their yard, poor folks shared pigs), the family mule (which they often rented out), two fruit trees, and a fruit and veggie plot.
Planting and harvest time, they and their 4 surviving kids would pitch in before and after the store was open on the business side of family farm, bringing in seed or fertilizer from the common community stores, and brining to he harvest to the processing mills or boxing plants to ship out to the buyers
Excess that wasn't eaten immediately from the sustainment plots everyone grew would be canned or otherwise preserved and either stored in a spring house or basement or sold to the grocer to sell to neighbors.
That was the way most farms work around the world.
They are businesses or communal efforts necessary to survive, not hobbies.
Even ancient Hunter-gatherers needed to collect into large groups to be able to provide enough food over the lean times to keep most of the individuals alive.
An individual living alone (or even a small family) had few options to keep himself or herself alive for any length of time before they had to depend on a larger group of helpers to get their survival needs together for, say, a few months of winter.
Just the exhaustion gathering enough food for the long term will kill an individual survivalist quick after two or three months without help or a large supply storage system.
mwmisses4289
(2,080 posts)farmers who voted for him are doing this same sort of lament: My workers are afraid to come to work. I didn't vote for this. He's hurting the wrong people.
Oh well. This finding out phase is really tough on them.
LeftInTX
(33,566 posts)She has too much variety and needs specialized help.
I applaud her for growing a farm the "right way", but it's lot of work and she wants to do alot of it herself.
marble falls
(67,980 posts)LeftInTX
(33,566 posts)
DBoon
(24,220 posts)The Hameau de la Reine (French pronunciation: [amo də la ʁɛn], The Queen's Hamlet) is a rustic retreat in the park of the Château de Versailles built for Marie Antoinette in 1783 near the Petit Trianon in Yvelines, France. It served as a private meeting place for the queen and her closest friends and as a place of leisure. Designed by Richard Mique, the queen's favoured architect, with the help of the painter Hubert Robert, it contained a meadowland with a lake and various buildings in a rustic or vernacular style, inspired by Norman or Flemish design, situated around an irregular pond fed by a stream that turned a mill wheel.[1] The building scheme included a farmhouse, (the farm was to produce milk and eggs for the queen), a dairy, a dovecote, a boudoir, a barn that burned down during the French Revolution, a mill and a tower in the form of a lighthouse. Each building is decorated with a garden, an orchard or a flower garden. The largest and most famous of these houses is the "Queen's House", connected to the Billiard house by a wooden gallery, at the center of the village. A working farm was close to the idyllic, fantasy-like setting of the Queen's Hamlet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hameau_de_la_Reine
marble falls
(67,980 posts)... uninformed romantics vision of a time she never lived.
snowybirdie
(6,309 posts)She's not the only one
Farmer-Rick
(12,018 posts)And had some legal immigrants working on my farm. But they all left...with some severerance pay... about 2 or 3 years ago.
I did hire a few non-immigrant workers but I closed down a lot of my fields and reduced my livestock as I got older. I still hire part time workers when I need it.
You could run your own farm by yourself and grow all your own food for yourself and your family, but you can't do anything else besides that. People always underestimate the amount of work required to raise your own food.
cloudbase
(6,050 posts)After all, there's no labor like child labor. It's the coming craze.
Ol Janx Spirit
(393 posts)...players and performances lined up. Enjoy the show Carrie!
Of course, her farm is in Tennessee and I'm sure our legislators would happily install an Alcatraz on her property if it all gets to be too much.
AverageOldGuy
(2,904 posts)
ProudMNDemocrat
(20,173 posts)Poor Carrie Underwood. Like I feel sorry for her and how she spends the money. 
rubbersole
(10,403 posts)Farm work is as tough as any business if the goal is self-sustaining positive cash flow. Especially if you worry about chipping a nail. 400 acres isn't a hobby. My dearest friends retired on 5 acres near Parrottville, TN. More like a massive garden rather than a small farm. From March to October it's non-stop sunrise 'til bedtime ass bustin'. They're dedicated. We enjoy their canned 'fruits' year round. There's no way the two of them could ever make a profit. If they weren't already well off there'd be 5 acres of weeds and a rusty plow in the barn. (Hey, that would make a great country song...)
marble falls
(67,980 posts)... screw them for what they've done to to the nation. Wait until food get starts not getting to market or tables.
We're ready for it. We're drying a lot of produce and buying canned for the first time in decades. What is in the freezer gets et first. We have propane for when utilities start failing.
Rincewind
(1,324 posts)how much help does she get from her big, strong husband? It's his farm too.
niyad
(126,749 posts)Scalded Nun
(1,486 posts)400 Acres? Probably pulling in tons of subsidy cash as well.
marble falls
(67,980 posts)Botany
(75,189 posts)She can always rent out her fields to a real farmer who can grow wheat, beans, and corn on them. Chickens suck because
the expression up with the chickens is true, keep a few horses for riding, get rid of the sheep or turn the whole thing into a
sheep ranch for wool & meet, fruit trees are also good but they are year round work and with Trump don’t count on having
pickers to harvest the fruit.
LeftInTX
(33,566 posts)I applaud her for trying, but this is really "too much, ideal farm"...She says she wants grow all her own food.
Botany
(75,189 posts)Farming is work. However she is a multi millionaire and her farm doesn’t need to make money.
cab67
(3,468 posts)The fact that she she grew up on a farm makes this marginally amusing - she should have known better.
I see this in my own profession. I encounter the occasional student who thinks being a paleontologist is a matter of digging something up and holding a press conference. Then they encounter what it's actually like. To their credit, they nearly always figure out the disparity between their vision and reality fairly quickly.
marble falls
(67,980 posts)... she has a truck garden, a big one.
GoCubsGo
(34,257 posts)One would think she already knew what she was getting into?
Blue Owl
(57,247 posts)
Ziggysmom
(3,892 posts)flood relief. Other than that I say “Suck it up buttercup”. I grew up an only kid on a farm. Got up every day by 4:30 to do all my chores before school. Then more chores after school. If you really love the farm, you don’t complain.
Duppers
(28,413 posts)her music (since I hate most country music - Willy Nelson doesn't count.) 😁 🎻
Ziggysmom
(3,892 posts)
Duppers
(28,413 posts)Country music wouldn't claim him. He's too liberal, educated, and not twangy enough.
LudwigPastorius
(13,335 posts)Posting this musical crime against humanity for reference purposes:
gab13by13
(29,635 posts)by her work boot straps.
twodogsbarking
(15,481 posts)
PJMcK
(24,173 posts)A successful entertainer and her formerly successful hockey player husband are worth something like $140 million, at least. They own a 400-acre farm with livestock and agriculture including fruited plants.
Despite her stardom, the successful entertainer cannot find enough labor to tend to her very large property and its contents. The story says that she gets up early and works late doing farm chores. The story doesn't indicate if her husband assists with these chores. It also doesn't say why she cannot keep farmhands employed on her farm.
Since the story is basically a poor-little-rich-girl tale of the woes of the rich and famous and it lacks any specificity or explanations of the circumstances, I'm uncertain as to why it was published. Who cares? If the farm is too much for her, Ms. Underwood should just sell it to someone who can run it efficiently.
There are several implications between the lines of the reporting-- if by reporting you mean ass-kissing of celebrities-- that are suggested by our current cultural and political circumstances. For example, were her farmhands so-called "illegals" illegally arrested by the Trump Administration? Does she offer competitive wages? Why can't she and her husband run the farm? Do they lack the management skills?
Once again, yahoo! news is nothing but fizz.
onethatcares
(16,908 posts)she's full of manure.
MineralMan
(149,706 posts)that farm owners are having a lot of trouble hiring workers right now. For one thing, the workers aren't showing up for fear of being hijacked and deported. For another, many of them have already had that happen, and are no longer in the job market.
While rural farmers are mostly Trump voters, Trump's policies are hitting those farmers where it hurts, and we're all going to pay for crops that don't get harvested on time, etc.
The story is more complicated than most of us realize.
Norrrm
(2,865 posts)The jobs republicans claim that the immigrants took.
hunter
(39,869 posts)... and they become part of an extended family, with all the drama and turmoil this entails.
You also have to rely on the support of the surrounding community as they rely on yours. Having good neighbors, and being a good neighbor, is essential.
No farm like this is an island. Self-sufficiency, the nuclear family, ever-fruitful work ethics, prosperity gospel -- all the qualities that U.S.A. "conservatives" drone on and on about like mindless cicadas -- these are all myths.
jalan48
(14,914 posts)"There's a tear in my beer" crowd will lap it up. Carrie as the victim.
LudwigPastorius
(13,335 posts)...but she loves her some Trump, so this was completely predictable.
Heidi
(58,630 posts)I suspect that, unlike many owners of small farms, she *can* afford to pay workers on her hobby farm a living wage; she just chooses not to.
JustABozoOnThisBus
(24,315 posts)tavernier
(13,902 posts)Mow down those needy plants and cover the ground with cement. Then you can install gold leaf tables and chairs, and vases with plastic roses that need no watering or pruning. Don’t bother with chickens and other smelly animals. McDonald’s has plenty of egg, bacon and sausage breakfast choices, and you can raise a family or an entire NFL team on Whoppers and fries. Keep a horse around for photo ops of you baling hay.
Aristus
(70,729 posts)Time to get up off your lazy white ass and put in an honest day's work for a change.
This ain't America Loves Karaoke. You have to really deliver on a farm. People aren't going to cheer and applaud you anymore just because you're blonde and pretty.