>>213115937I'm not at all involved in ag, but it is literally impossible to start a first generation farm in the US nowadays unless you have a shit ton of money. Everyone who has even a moderately-sized operation going is like a 3rd or 4th generation farm, and even those family-owned farms are struggling because of giant corpos basically wiping them out. Profit margins for grain crops are razor thin, and from what I've seen none of the fancy Deere or Case equipment (which has repairability issues) is in widespread use. It's not uncommon to see farms still running combines from the 80s-90s.
Someone else can correct me though.