My wife was raised on a farm in NW Illinois. The most fertile soil you'll ever find. Her dad had a feed lot that held about two hundred head of cattle and also raised about 900 head of hog at any given time.
Their 1000 acres provided all the feed for both, plus they grew and sold corn and soy beans.
They had perhaps a dozen vehicles of all vintages, back to the turn of the 20th. century and all but one or two were operable all the time. I was fascinated by them as a city boy. They rigged one old tractor to run backwards. It towed the water tank out to wherever the hog pens were every year. They moved them because the hogs produced all the fertilizer they needed for a given area so each year a different piece of acreage was fertilized for free.
Her brother eventually decided to start a side business and bought the most Rube Goldberg machine you ever saw. Bigger than a 6 by, it was a seed cleaner. Supposedly, soy beans for replanting did much better if hulls etc. were removed before planting. He started running around that part of the country selling the service to other farmers.
Well this thing had more belts, mostly exposed without safety guards, chains, chutes and plumbing than I've ever seen on a vehicle. You threw the on switch and stepped back. It would work noisely for an hour and a belt would get thrown or a chain would break, or a clog would develop somewhere in the system and then it would take from a half hour to a day to get it back up and running again. It even bagged the beans, if it ran long enough.
Didn't take more than a season or so to decide that the behemoth wasn't going to produce much profit so he sold it off.
That brother was always coming up with dubious, half baked ventures, including a wind farm where there turned out to not be much wind. Proof positive that doing your due diligence and homework might just pay off.
I believe only one farm truck had convex mirrors.