Comment by kokanee

1 day ago

I started to write a logical rebuttal, but forget it. This is just so dumb. A guy is paying farmers to farm for him, and using a chatbot to Google everything he doesn't know about farming along the way. You're all brainwashed.

What specifically are you disagreeing with? I dont think its trivial for someone with no farming experience to successfully farm something within a year.

>A guy is paying farmers to farm for him

Read up on farming. The labor is not the complicated part. Managing resources, including telling the labor what to do, when, and how is the complicated part. There is a lot of decision making to manage uncertainty which will make or break you.

  • We should probably differentiate between trying to run a profitable farm, and producing any amount of yield. They're not really the same thing at all.

    I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money. Running a profitable farm is quite difficult though. There's an entire ecosystem connecting prospective farmers with money and limited skills/interest to people with the skills to properly operate it, either independently (tenant farmers) or as farm managers so the hobby owner can participate. Institutional investors prefer the former, and Jeremy Clarkson's farm show is a good example of the latter.

    • When I say successful I mean more like profitable. Just yielding anything isn't succesful by any stretch of the imagination.

      >I would submit that pretty much any joe blow is capable of growing some amount of crops, given enough money

      Yeah in theory. In practice they wont - too much time and energy. This is where the confidence boost with LLMs comes in. You just do it and see what happens. You don't need to care if it doesn't quite work out it its so fast and cheap. Maybe you get anywhere from 50-150% of the result of your manual research for 5% of the effort.

>A guy is paying farmers to farm for him

Family of farmers here.

My family raises hundreds of thousands of chickens a year. They feed, water, and manage the healthcare and building maintenance for the birds. That is it. Baby birds show up in boxes at the start of a season, and trucks show up and take the grown birds once they reach weight.

There is a large faceless company that sends out contracts for a particular value and farmers can decide to take or leave it. There is zero need for human contact on the management side of the process.

At the end of the day there is little difference between a company assigning the work and having a bank account versus an AI following all the correct steps.

> A guy is paying farmers to farm for him

Pedantically, that's what a farmer does. The workers are known as farmhands.

  • That is HIGHLY dependent on the type and size of farm. A lot of small row crop farmers have and need no extra farm hands.

    • All farms need farmhands. On some farms the farmer may play double duty, or hire custom farmhands operating under another business, but they are all farmhands just the same.