That depends partly on how busy they are at the time. The lack of time can be a deciding issue especially at planting and harvest time. Farm equipment is getting more complex as time goes on. Farmers sometimes assume a problem is more complicated than it actually is. They call repairmen when they don't need to at times because of that. Quite a few farmers also hire to have their fields sprayed. One thing that surprised me is how many farmers use crop consultants. The consultants do the soil sampling for nutrients and check the crops' development. They check for disease and insect infestations. The consultants also check soil moisture levels in the summer and make recommendations for irrigation.
Probably not. There are something like a million and a half farmers left in the U.S.
Those are the mostly mechanistic reasons -- more fundamentally, any farmer who is actually farming for a living these days is the CEO of a (not necessarily all that small) business and his time is very often far more valuable making decisions on such data and other management tasks than it is in actually doing the work itself (altho I don't know a one that doesn't have calloused hands and dirt under their fingernails).
Am one of the remaining 1+ M; while fairly small by local standards it's no less true that most of my time is taken up w/ either the business end or other management tasks; the larger the operation the more true it becomes.
But even 50 years ago, father and even grandfather before him had a judgment of what was or was not time-effective use of their available time and what went to town. When time for harvesting or sowing wheat came around, replacing bearings in the drill disks and new scrapers was homework; an engine needing rebuilding almost certainly went to town simply owing to the time and complexity. Partly that was constrained by the fact that at that time we did not have the fully-equipped enclosed, heated/cooled/lighted shop; everything had to happen outside. Now could take on a lot of things didn't then but on the way equipment has improved so the frequency of those kinds of jobs has gone down. The point on complexity is, however, real--there are just many things that owing to the computerized nature of even things like air seeders that just require the specialized gear of the dealer shop.
OTOH, while that's an expense, the scale and precision and resulting combination of more acres/hour and better results afterwards makes the features not only desirable but mandatory to actual be profitable with such high input costs as are today.
Rest of a good explanation cut due to AIOE quotation limit.
That reminds me of a time I repaired an irrigation system for a guy. He naturally asked what I'd fixed. My explanation must've gotten a little long winded. He cut me off and said: "Never mind. I can always hire you to fix that stuff. I need to spend my time managing the money."
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