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Most of the farmers I know and deal with do own (or make payments on) rolling stock of over $1 million. You have to in order to farm the amount of ground needed to be profitable (in the plains, around 2,500 to 3,000 acres). Fertilizer, seed lines, herbicide, and tracking of what parcel produces what (typically with Greenstar or similar tech). If you just through seed in the ground and hope for the best, just save time and move.

For livestock, a decent hog operation will have a few tens of thousand head in different iso buildings, most are automatically controlled. So five guys maintain the operation (or less, though that is a lot of ground to cover). The breeding is done with specialized lines of genetics and artificial insemination. While some “organic” farms still use boars, I know of no major operation that does things the old fashioned way.

For cattle feed lots.. The ones I’ve dealt with, and I have dealt with quite a few, have a nutritionist on staff or partner with another corp to have one with them. Feed rations are optimized for climate, yield, and cost per pound produced. Getting the ration right is the difference between making a decent amount of money or going broke in a cycle. The good operations have a few marketing guys (Angus cattle for instance!), and that all takes money.

Sorry if that doesn’t conform to your eastern biases.

Farming is not some toothless guy with a dozen chickens. Those guys, where they exist, are hobby farmers. Now, I know a few of them. They make me laugh. Doing things that way would mean the US and the world would have a famine in short order. They typically are doing it as a hobby (heck, I approach my garden the same way!).

But what do i know. I have just been working with ag and ag products for most of my life.

A very entertaining book, The Last Centurion by John Ringo, has a sub plot about how the “average” farm is operated, and what happens when a bunch of grasshoppers take over. Hint, look at Zimbabwe.