There is a deep misunderstanding about how modern farms work. Farmers are smart - they have to do because there is no iterating on a bad crop. You fail once or twice (often because of reasons beyond your control like the weather) and you can be out of business. And failing might not be known until a 6-9 month long harvest.
Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but because they have a local sale rep who knows the soil conditions and can recommend a variety that will do well for them, and also has a lot of technology backing that up. And the farmers have a lot of their own data - both digital and well-worn knowledge from neighbors. They will gladly pay a lot for seed if they know that seed will produce N% more output.
And no one saves the crop seeds to plant next year, although they easily could despite EULAs, but they know that hybrid drift and other factors will make less money.
Like Smarter Every Day says, farmers are smart[0].
Farmers are not smart. They operate outdoor biofactoriea accordong to protocols defined by people far away and using all manner of materials focussed on maintaoning the factory, not the farming.
Ask any agronomist. There's even that Netflix documentary. Industrial farmers understand the economics of their operation, but very little about its biology. They know as much about that as Amazon warehouse workers know about how the GPU you ordered is built.
EVEN a Netflix documentary about it? Wow. You told us, albeit with a few spelling and grammatical mistakes.
If you believe farmers are beholden to whoever you think they serve, you should be twice as suspicious of agronomists who have no literal and figurative skin in the game.
They agree that farmers understand financials. But they also restates what you said. Farmers don’t understand the actual biology of farming. They are dependent on the company provided experts for that.
The only real difference between you and the other commenter is your definition of the word “smart”. You both agree on the facts.
Also, “Even a Netflix documentary” is a horrible comeback when the original comment’s “evidence” is as a YouTube video.
Not all farmers understand the depths of the biology they work with, but some probably do.
Not all programmers understand how their instructions influence the circuits that execute them. That does not validate statements like "programmers don't understand electronics."
Yeah, I don't know why you think farmers are "smart" (taking this meaning to convey that we shouldn't question their practices). If you pump enough water and fertilizer into the already-fertile land you can get things to grow. Wow. If farmers were actually smart they'd start thinking long term on how their practices are destroying their livelihood (draining aquifers, polluting rivers, degrading soil quality) or how their politics are driving future generations from rural US (anti education, anti immigration, anti everything). Credentials: grew up in rural midwest.
It looks easy until you face pests, diseases, soil nutrient deficiencies, drought, unfavourable market conditions leading to losses etc. And it's a low margin business so you need to do everything with maximum efficiency to stay ahead.
A programming analogy: Anyone can write an hello world program in Python after a 10 minute tutorial, but delivering software that you can make a living from is much harder.
Farmers love "Big Ag"'s seeds not because they are naive, but because they have a local sale rep who knows the soil conditions and can recommend a variety that will do well for them, and also has a lot of technology backing that up. And the farmers have a lot of their own data - both digital and well-worn knowledge from neighbors. They will gladly pay a lot for seed if they know that seed will produce N% more output.
And no one saves the crop seeds to plant next year, although they easily could despite EULAs, but they know that hybrid drift and other factors will make less money.
Like Smarter Every Day says, farmers are smart[0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywBV6M7VOFU