Myth: Daylight Saving Time was Created to Benefit Farmers

It’s a story that continues to crop up: daylight saving time was created for the agriculture industry to offer more daylight hours to work in the field, according to a History.com article. The truth of the matter is the agriculture industry lobbied against daylight saving time in 1919. Some believe it was then that farmers became associated with daylight saving time, even though they were only involved because they were against it.

The first implementation of daylight saving time occurred in Germany in 1916 as a way to conserve coal usage during World War I. The U.S. followed suit in 1918, and the implementation has come and gone over the years. It has been particularly popular as a means to conserve energy with the thinking being that if the summer sunlight lasts longer into the evening, it is one less hour of darkness that will need to be lit, cooled, or heated.

Daylight Saving Time and Farming

Many farmers and others in agriculture are still opposed to daylight saving time. What it actually does is disrupt a farmer’s carefully orchestrated schedule. For instance, if dairy cows are used to being milked at 5:00 a.m., moving the clock back an hour in the fall actually moves their milking time back an hour, and livestock cannot understand waiting another hour to be milked. Then, just as the cows get used to it, the milking schedule gets changed again in the spring. The milk truck is likely still coming at the same time per the clock, meaning dairy farmers can’t just change their milking times to keep it consistent for the animals.

Similarly, daylight saving time also affects the amount of time put in by farmworkers. If hired hands have to wait an extra hour for daylight to start working in the morning, but they still leave at the same time at night, less work is getting done. All in all, farmers would rather just use the sun and the seasons to determine milking times, planting charts, and the best time to harvest.

Ben Franklin Didn’t Invent Daylight Saving Time

Ben Franklin is often credited as the inventor of daylight saving time — after all, the concept seems on-brand for the founding father who once championed early waking and bedtimes as the key to success. It’s a myth that Franklin invented daylight saving time, though he did once suggest a similar idea. In 1784, Franklin (then living in France) wrote a letter to the Journal de Paris, suggesting that French citizens could conserve candles and money by syncing their schedules with the sun. Franklin’s proposal — wittily written and considered a joke by many historians — didn’t recommend adjusting clocks; the idea was to start and end the day with the sun’s rising and setting, regardless of the actual time.

Franklin’s proposal didn’t get far, but nearly 100 years later, another science-minded thinker devised the daylight saving time strategy we’re familiar with today. George Vernon Hudson, a postal worker and entomologist living in New Zealand, presented the basics of the idea in 1895. Hudson’s version moved clocks ahead two hours in the spring in an effort to extend daylight hours; for him, the biggest benefit of a seasonal time shift would be longer days in which he could hunt for bugs after his post office duties were finished. Hudson’s proposal was initially ridiculed, but three decades later, in 1927, New Zealand’s Parliament gave daylight saving a shot as a trial, and the Royal Society of New Zealand even awarded Hudson a medal for his ingenuity.