I would imagine it's the constant problem-solving with real-world, "dirty" problems. You can't take the fact that your crops are failing through a debugger and reason about it line-by-line. You can't quickly run another simulation. You can't insert a single solution at one point and know that it won't affect the rest of the application.

Your answers are always based on fuzzy data, experience, and intuition. Your solutions will always affect the local ecosystem of the crops, and cause hard-to-predict chain reactions.

...but I'm not a farmer, so I'm just guessing.

I suspect it's that and so much more! There's a huge science aspect to it now; and every year there's new pesticides, new seed varieties, crop-rations, yield techniques, etc. Not to mention the huge complicated business and tax bureaucracy that is modern farming. I'm sure this is only a small slice which is why it would be great to see more.

What I don't have even a sense of is how much of a daily concern a lot of this is or if it's a once-a-year kind of thing, or how much of it impacts somebody who "only" farms to support his family and may only have 1-2 workers versus hundreds.

That is a good question. I'm not sure how well I will be able to put it into words, but I'll give it a go! For what it is worth, I have a grain farm, so my perspective comes from that type of operation.

A big one is simply the breadth of the subject matter. To me it feels like learning to program, forgetting everything, and repeating several more times. You have to know about plants, chemicals, machinery, computer technology, business, just to name a few. I don't think you need to be a expert in any of those things, but it seems to me like the most successful farmers approach being that.

Every year is different. If you've built one CRUD app, every CRUD app is going to come with a similar set of problems. If you've grown one field of corn, who knows what next year will bring? I've been farming for more than a decade now and I still encounter situations that I've never seen before. Luckily, which makes it much less of a challenge, but might be interesting being that I'm the sixth generation to work my family's farm, I can ask family for advice and you get the "Well, back in '72 it was like this and we did that." Still, there is lots of problem solving to do. In that respect, it is a lot like programming.

What is not not like programming is an answer for everything on the internet. I truly miss that. While programming, if I have any kind of mental block, a few minutes on Google will turn me right around. On the farm, family is an amazing resource, and there are plenty of academic and other professionals available to be contacted, but it's not the same. Programmers are incredibly fortunate!

I'll just throw in that farming constantly makes me feel dumb. Still, after a decade at it. Not very quantitate, I know, but it's a feeling I have never experienced in the same way as a programmer. I'm sure I could go on, but I have to move on to other engagements. I hope you found this interesting.

Thank you very much for the thoughtful response! The parallels are interesting. Farming sounds a lot like writing assembly! Start over every time, have to know about wildly arcane and disparate concepts, hard to get help except from somebody who has encountered something very similar perhaps a long time ago, and takes many years to feel productive.

My grandfather was a farmer. By necessity he was also forced to become a competent mechanic, carpenter, electrician, and plumber (did I miss any?).

Farmers are the most self-sufficient people you'll ever meet.

They've always been (incorrectly) characterized in what I've seen in media/pop-culture as hardworking but relatively simple. The more I learn about the difficulties of modern farming and what it takes to succeed, the more respect I have. I'd love read a blog from somebody with career-level experience in both software-engineering and farming. I'm sure I/we could learn a lot.

Business person, maybe economist when you take into account prices for crops and deciding what to grow.