No I disagree. The word “boer” with a small b is a Dutch word for farmer but the term Boer [ with a capital B ] came to denote the Eastern Border Afrikaans speaking descendents of the Trekboers. It really matters not one bit whatever the term “boer” meant before it was applied to & adopted by the Boers [ Boer people / Boerevolk / Boer folk / Boer Nation. etc. ] during the 1700s because the term Boer with a capital B denotes a people who were renown for being Africa’s first freedom fighters & having established several Boer Republics [ which history clearly denoted as Boer Republics & the people who created them as Boers ] before being conquered by the British after the second Anglo-Boer War wherein more than 50% of the Boer child population died in the British run concentration camps. The Boer people started out as a pastoral & rustic people but they are not just a bunch of farmers. It would be like pointing out that the term Serb just means “sir” thereby implying that there are no Serbs or that the Serbs are just sirs / men. The Boers have had long hard fought struggles to maintain their distinct identity in the face of strong pressures. Not least of which from the Cape Dutch descended Afrikaners whose leadership routinely tries to co-opt or assimilate the Boer Nation.
I've never heard it said that "Serb" meant "sir."
The late Albert Bates Lord, better known for his work on oral poetry and Homer, recorded Serb, Bosnian, and Albanian oral poets in the former Yugoslavia (initially as an assistant to Milman Parry but he continued long after Parry's death in 1935). He wrote an introduction to the Serbo-Croatian language which has reading selections from a novel (in Serbian) which compared a Serb in Serbia to a Boer (this was at the time of the Boer War--one point of comparison was Serbia's struggle against the Turks being analogous to the Boers' struggle against the English, but this particular man was being compared to a Boer because he had a very large family like the Boers of that day). I forget the title--maybe something like "Boers and Englishmen."