[Yeroc]

If you spend time on the website you can see the plan is to rent (only!) 5 acres of land for this project. Since it's a lease only and such a small plot it seems unlikely to get him into trouble. Given the small size though I'm dubious he'll find it easy to get any custom operators interested in doing a job that small!

[bluGill]

You can find such custom operators - but those are not deal made over the internet, they are made in person with a handshake. Generally the cost to get all the equipment there is - in a good year - all of your possible profit for something that small. Tractors are slow on the road. Once the tractor is there the implement needs to unfold (best case - worse case your combine header is pulled in via a separate truck and needs to be attached). You need to clean the machine out after every field and put new seed in... It isn't worth planting 5 acres of corn. You need volume - and in turn a lot of land - to make corn work.

[Yeroc]

Agreed. Growing up on a small farm (~1120 acres) our garden alone was probably at least 5 acres in size. It's laughably small, the only way he'll succeed is for a neighbouring farmer to take pity on him.

[LeifCarrotson]

If a neighboring farmer needs a bit of cash, has some land or equipment, and gets an email (or phone call!) from [e-mail] reading generally:

> I'm about to lease some acreage at {address near you} and willing to pay {competitive rate} to hire someone to work that land for me, are you interested?

I see no reason why that couldn't eventually succeed. I'm sure that being an out-of-state investor who doesn't have any physical hands to finalize the deal with a handshake is an impediment, but with enough tokens, Farmer Fred could make 100,000 phone calls and send out 100,000 emails to every landowner and work-for-hire equipment operator in Iowa, Texas, and Argentina by this afternoon. If there exists a human who would make that deal, Fred can eventually find them. Seth would be limited in his chance to succeed in these efforts because he can only make one 1-minute phone call per minute, Fred can become as many callers as Anthropic owns GPUs.

I do find it amusing that Fred currently shows the following dashboard:

    Iowa
    HOLD
    0°F
    Unknown (API error)
    Fred's Thinking: “Iowa is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”

     Fred is here
    South Texas
    HOLD
    0°F
    Unknown (API error)
    Fred's Thinking: “South Texas is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”

    Argentina
    HOLD
    0°F
    Unknown (API error)
    Fred's Thinking: “Argentina is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”

Any human Fred might call in the Argentinian summer or 70F South Texas winter weather is not going to gain confidence when Fred tries to build rapport through some small talk about the unseasonably cold weather...

[direwolf20]

> Fred is here

Ah, they've created SCP-423

[greedo]

And I'm sure a farmer who's already busy is going to waste his time on a five acre lot. Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible. I'm sure there's a dollar amount that would motivate someone, but at a profitable rate, not a chance in hell.

[9rx]

> Hell, the yield on such a small lot (it'll mostly be end rows) will be terrible.

One of my fields has a creek in the corner that divides just two acres from the rest of the field. I've never noticed any meaningful yield drag in that part.

[greedo]

Perhaps your soil is more fertile in that area? It's not uncommon to see a 25% drop in acreage on the border of fields due to trees, end rows etc.

[9rx]

25% would be quite extreme. There is some evidence of that much loss on individual rows being possible, but not the entire headland. 10% is considered to be more typical, which works out to be around a 4% loss across the entire piece. Which is well within the normal range of field variability, so it is ultimately not noticeable.

Of course, if it were a 5 acre field, with some assumptions about its shape, we'd only be talking more like a 2% loss across the entire field. Not nothing, but terrible...?

Year-to-year variability will see much larger swings than that. If that's the margin you're trying to operate on, I dare say you're cooked, even if your fields are large.

[rappatic]

I love the variety of people that come to HN. There are real farmers weighing on on the plausibility of this.

[ryukoposting]

Came here to mention this. Nobody farming 5 acres of land has a "farm manager" LOL. Hell, nobody farming 50 acres of land needs a farm manager. The gaping chasm between what this guy is purporting to do, and what is actually being demonstrated, is laughable.