I am watching Silver Spoon on VRV / Crunchyroll. I just finished the first episode. It’s a funny slice-of-life anime, about a student attending an agricultural boarding school. He selected the school because he could live there, which makes me curious about his home life and why he wants to avoid it. His name is Yugo / Yuugo Hachiken. The other students view him as different than them, because he attended a prep school. Having no experience with farm life, or agriculture, he makes rookie mistakes like chasing a calf and getting lost in the woods (instead of leaving it alone, so the instructor could entice him back into his corral with food). He is disgusted seeing where eggs come from, and he’s not used to the manual labor, and level of fitness one needs to keep up with the daily life of agriculture. However, he gives his all in completing the tasks assigned, and he has great classmates that help him integrate into campus and farm life.

What I found fascinating about this show, is it does an outstanding job of showing the real work, science, intellect, and methods behind successful agriculture and working with animals. The students who attend have various goals; to be farmers, to take over their family’s business, to become vets, to run farm-to-table restaurants, and other aspirations. I’m not sure who made this distinction, or why some societies have taken this view that career paths involving manual labor is “less” or “demeaning”, but these institutions are important and have meaning. The pandemic, quarantine, COVID, and life as we know it, has made that even more apparent. The jobs people may be dismissive about, or look down upon, truly keep society running. And agriculture, without it, where would we be? Eating chemical laden preserved foods I suppose, but that’s usually not the healthier option. The scenes below show some of the culture shock Hachiken experiences, as he realizes the full scope of attending an agricultural high school. Waking up early to help with the chickens, keeping crops safe from unpredictable weather, working with animals, and learning how to properly run operations were some of Hachiken’s first experiences at his new school. And he realizes the assumptions we make about others, aren’t always accurate.