So I have to pay my municipal waterworks, a salt miner, a sugar beet farmer, a rapeseed farmer, a wheat farmer, and whatever you call a yeast maker, plus their adjacent industries (I don’t by sugar beets, I buy refined granular sugar, etc) and multiple truck and train drivers who move all of those goods in their various states of manufacture around the continent.

The good news is that, thanks to economies of scale, all of these consumer goods are incredibly cheap by unit weight.

The bad news is the we've privatized so much of the agricultural infrastructure and stuck so many middle men in between you and the raw labor that produce these useful goods, that the margins on cost are enormous.

How hard can it be to scale that up to hundreds of acres? Modern farmers need a bachelor’s degree, you need to know about plants and animals and soil and all manner of shit to be a farmer. “Put seeds in ground, plants grow.” Yes, but actually no.

The beauty of industrial farming isn't in simplicity but yield. Nitrogen fixed fertilizer and modern irrigation and combine harvester mean a handful of professionals can do the work of thousands of amateurs.

But if you don't actually know what you're doing, or employ someone who does, all that investment is wasted.