I think that you shouldn't call other profession lazy/ignorant in general. People only tend to maximize their profits and minimize efforts, and this is natural. This, in no way, means that farmers are lazy and certainly not ignorant. A better rephrasing would be: "Time for farmers to switch ..."
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News flash: I'm not talking about all farmers, I'm specifically talking about farmers who are either lazy or ignorant. Rotational grazing with cover crops is vastly superior to running fields constantly by juicing them with fertilizer and tilling. It does require knowledge, however, and the will to move livestock around regularly, which a lot of bad farmers lack.
A general advice that I have found useful in life is that if you see something that requires a change (in organization, business process, lifestyle or just about anything that has humans as a component) that doesn't directly involve yourself, then the best way to point it out is never to start with the assumption that people are just "lazy/ignorant". This is hostile and will usually have a negative effect on the willingness of the concerned individual to change.
Even in this case, the farmer who are farming on their own land are under no obligation to change their way of life or farming process. Even though we know that the methods they are using may be sub-optimal and a net-negative in the long run, we simply cannot make them change it, and certainly never by labelling them negative. We can make them see the benefits, or how it plays out in the long run and help them choose a better solution but ultimately, it's them doing the choosing.
At the end, if something is really really required, then it must be the Governments making regulation. This is how it generally works (I'm not saying I like it).
Let's try this: There are lazy/ignorant software engineers who write everything in a single file with no function because it's the easiest to write/initially run & test. This is a known terrible practice, but if you never have to deal with the code down the line, you wouldn't know this. There's nothing wrong with calling out the fact that these people are being lazy/ignorant.
Can the bad farmers continue to farm debt (primarily)? Sure, but if they're doing it to themselves we shouldn't feel bad for them, or bail them out.
No. If the code they write works for them, then they have done their job. People only realized that it was a bad practice once they found that the code was NOT doing their job (i.e. it was difficult to fix/debug when error occurred, it was immensely difficult to update, and it was nigh impossible to make sense of by your cohorts reading your code).
People only do what a) They are taught in the first place (programming classes, reliable blogs etc.), b) Their work environment imposes on them (organizations having coding practices or standards), c) They, through some personal experiences, find out that it makes their job easier down the line, or d) It is the right thing to do.
Expecting everyone to follow (d) is out of the question and in my experience all "good" work happens via (b) i.e. rules, regulations and standards that have been enforced. If some sub-optimal choice minimizes effort while maximizing rewards, then that is not sub-optimal, at least for the individual, even though it clearly could be a sub-optimal for the collective.
I plant cover crops, but have no interest in animals. I have a software job to worry about when I'm not on the land and it would be economically foolish to trade that for time spent in animal husbandry. Nobody seems to want to rent my cover crops to feed their animals either, so I'm guessing I'm not the only who doesn't see the economic value.
Crops prices have priced in the increased fertilizer cost already, so it is what it is. We're used to it.
It's common for one farmer to plant and harvest thousands of acres pretty much by himself, at least in North America. Labour, particularly up in Canada, is often in short supply which makes moving livestock around impractical - and not all of them even keep livestock, because it's not profitable unless you're keeping thousands of head.
The conventional ag model where you have one farmer monocropping a thousand acres are the reason the #1 thing most farmers grow is debt. That requires expensive specialized equipment, and much heavier application of pesticides and fertilizers than a balanced system, so both your fixed and variable costs are high.
If you want to see a profitable, productive mid sized farm, check out Polyface. Joel makes a good living while treating his land and animals well.
Thing is that conventional farming, as you call it, and startups have a lot of in common. The goal is not to earn a tidy profit each year, but instead to build up massive capital for one huge payday when you get bought out. I suspect nobody really cares to see a profitable mid-sized farm as that kind of misses the appeal of farming. If you just want a steady income there are much better paying and less stressful jobs out there.
The interesting thing is that there are a lot of young(ish) people interested in farming, who really do want to run a profitable mid-sized farm. Most of these people just don't have the resources to buy into land, so most of the ones that do it have inherited derelict farms. A few of them do it with leased land, but that's risky as regenerative ag requires a time investment and getting the rug pulled out from under you can be a real bummer.
I'd argue that our mega-ag model is a big part of the problem, it's given us stupidly cheap corn/soy while causing a lot of health and pollution problems, and basically ruining farming as an actual profession.
Corn and soybeans are cheap because they're really easy to handle. The process is almost entirely automated at this point, allowing one person to do what would have required thousands of people in the past. Other areas of agriculture have not been so easy to remove the human element, requiring nearly as many people today as a century ago. With reduced scaling potential, you don't see the same cost reduction.
The problem is that the cost reduction is a bit of an illusion, since your fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide costs are going to go up over time as your land turns marginal, and since there are so many mega-farms running huge GPS controlled equipment you're never going to be cost competitive at a smaller scale for corn/soy, but you have to accept the market price, which leaves a razor thin margin (if any at all).
The economics of farming are all fucked up, because our current farming practices have a lot of externalities that aren't priced into conventional produce, and producers who try to improve things to remove these externalities either have to take a loss versus the producers who say "fuck the future, fuck everyone who isn't me" or create new markets for their goods (which is where the whole farmer's market movement and the local food guilt thing come from).
If you're running multiple crops, don't you need specialized equipment for each? Making it a bigger investment in equipment, or more likely to not have the right equipment at the right time if you have to rent/borrow it?
That depends on the crop. Tree shakers and orchard/tree nut related equipment tends to be pretty standardized, and a lot of crops can share a small(-ish) common pool of tractor attachments, but if you choose your diversifications poorly you could be on the hook for some hefty equipment costs. Also, I would lean on cash crops where the SoTA is harvesting by migrant labor. There is definitely a knowledge/planning component to multi-cropping.