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