I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what really impressed me was how much reading every one of these farmers was doing. Soil science and so forth is apparently a continually evolving field, and a modern farmer has no choice but to keep up with it. It really challenged my citybred prejudice of farmers as somehow uneducated.