Actually the farmers in my family have to reprogram their clocks twice a year to avoid DST, since cows are incredibly sensitive to their milking schedule and the twice-a-year hourly shift really screws with the herd.

I would go so far as to say that farmers hate DST more than programmers/sysadmins do.

Why do farmers bother they cows with DST, then? Can't they just get up at the same (real) time?

I think one of the problems is that the milk trucks and the rest of the industry do respect DST so if you lose one hour the milk might spoil. At least it's what I heard a farmer say on the TV a couple years ago.

Thanks. That's the first time I heard that argument considered.

This is where I get to offer a famed quote from one our politicians in Queensland, Australia, who was arguing against daylight saving when Queensland was considering adopting DST in the 1980s.

She said we shouldn't adopt DST because the extra hour of sunlight - and I quote directly here - would "fade the curtains".

It's probably not about farmers: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4172

Okay, that was a bit too subtle:

http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F05.html

Farmers work whenever they want.

And people haven't been using farm schedules to justify DST for several decades. It's now supposedly about electricity use.

It's about continuing to justify what has always been a bad idea of which the powers that be refuse to let go.