[PrismCrystal]

I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what really impressed me was how much reading every one of these farmers was doing. Soil science and so forth is apparently a continually evolving field, and a modern farmer has no choice but to keep up with it. It really challenged my citybred prejudice of farmers as somehow uneducated.

[defrost]

It's big big business here even if the farms are still "family farms" .. the land parcels are larger with both owned and leased, there are houses on farm(s) to maintain, houses and shops in nearby rural town, semi industrial town lots for staging goods, silo's (six storey and higher buildings), rail heads, small fleets of giant machines, several millions in assets to manage, local, state, and federal politics to navigate.

The science side is Ag and soil, lots of GIS IT, asset tag systems for records (individual animals and seed plots, etc), robots, laser scanning for wool fibre, ... (long list).

These are not enterprises that can managed by idiots.