If you spend time on the website you can see the plan is to rent (only!) 5 acres of land for this project. Since it's a lease only and such a small plot it seems unlikely to get him into trouble. Given the small size though I'm dubious he'll find it easy to get any custom operators interested in doing a job that small!

▲ bluGill 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You can find such custom operators - but those are not deal made over the internet, they are made in person with a handshake. Generally the cost to get all the equipment there is - in a good year - all of your possible profit for something that small. Tractors are slow on the road. Once the tractor is there the implement needs to unfold (best case - worse case your combine header is pulled in via a separate truck and needs to be attached). You need to clean the machine out after every field and put new seed in... It isn't worth planting 5 acres of corn. You need volume - and in turn a lot of land - to make corn work.

▲ Yeroc an hour ago | parent [-]

Agreed. Growing up on a small farm (~1120 acres) our garden alone was probably at least 5 acres in size. It's laughably small, the only way he'll succeed is for a neighbouring farmer to take pity on him.

	▲	LeifCarrotson 14 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If a neighboring farmer needs a bit of cash, has some land or equipment, and gets an email (or phone call!) from farmerfred@proofofcorn.com reading generally: > I'm about to lease some acreage at {address near you} and willing to pay {competitive rate} to hire someone to work that land for me, are you interested? I see no reason why that couldn't eventually succeed. I'm sure that being an out-of-state investor who doesn't have any physical hands to finalize the deal with a handshake is an impediment, but with enough tokens, Farmer Fred could make 100,000 phone calls and send out 100,000 emails to every landowner and work-for-hire equipment operator in Iowa, Texas, and Argentina by this afternoon. If there exists a human who would make that deal, Fred can eventually find them. Seth would be limited in his chance to succeed in these efforts because he can only make one 1-minute phone call per minute, Fred can become as many callers as Anthropic owns GPUs. I do find it amusing that Fred currently shows the following dashboard: `Iowa HOLD 0°F Unknown (API error) Fred's Thinking: “Iowa is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.” Fred is here South Texas HOLD 0°F Unknown (API error) Fred's Thinking: “South Texas is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.” Argentina HOLD 0°F Unknown (API error) Fred's Thinking: “Argentina is frozen solid. Been through worse. We wait.”` Any human Fred might call in the Argentinian summer or 70F South Texas winter weather is not going to gain confidence when Fred tries to build rapport through some small talk about the unseasonably cold weather...
	▲	rappatic 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I love the variety of people that come to HN. There are real farmers weighing on on the plausibility of this.