A Structural Explanation of Farm Injury

The other day it occurred to me that there is a very simple structural explanation as to why farming is so darn hard on the body. Consider the following:


That's right, what we have there is a diagram of a human, standing comfortably on the earth. If we roughly categorise the components of the system above, we see there are different bands of functionality oriented in space:

That is, our head contain four out of our five major perceptual apparatuses. Our upper torso houses our hands and arms which for a "small"-scale vegetable farmer are the primary tools for manipulating the world (i.e. weeding, grasping, pushing). Our hands are also our primary tools of our sense of touch. Our torso is all about supporting the upper part of our body in all of its positions, and in addition contains many of our major organs. Our legs are also part of our support system but they are differentiated by their primary role in our locomotion. And finally, at the very bottom is the earth.

Now, for us farmers here's the problem:

All of our tools -- our eyes, arms, and hands -- are located at the top most part of our body. The earth and the vegetables that grow in it -- our primary work area -- are located beneath our body. That is, our tools are separated from our work area by a large gap (relative to the size of our body). To bridge the gap and bring all of our equipment down to where we are going to use it, we need to fold our body. And the folding happens either at our back, hips or legs, or all three -- but it definitely has to happen.

Thus, in order to do much of our work we're bound to put strain on these areas of our bodies. It's an unavoidable consequence of the physical layout of the human body. Of course, this is a well-known problem -- it's why we have long handles on tools, and why home gardeners have raised beds, and such. I just thought it's interesting.

Now, given a few millenia of evolution maybe farmers will end up like this:

(That's an extra head on the lower torso, and a pair of arms coming out of the thighs).