And are these tractors used as their daily equipment or do they use something more modern by default and only bring the old stuff out on the rare occasions when the number of tractors doing tractor things is a big enough production bottleneck to warrant it?
I work on plenty of old junk for people. I know how this kind of stuff gets used and how important it is and isn't to business operations. There are a very tiny number of people who run large fleets of old junk with enough redundancy they are not lacking for uptime. These people are a rounding error compared to the number of people who have one or more new-ish machines and keep a couple pieces of old junk (usually very large or very niche machines) around for a particular use that the newer machines could cover but not as well as something dedicated. And this is how it works in pretty much any industry that uses heavy equipment, not just farming.
You're not wrong, but I'm having difficulty understanding the point you're after. Farms large and small use equipment new and old and have periods during the year when shit can't break.
Of course the largest exposure to the right to repair issue is with the large farms. They run the greatest percentage of newest (so greater likelihood of incident) and largest (greater impact of downtime) equipment. However, I'd say the greatest existential risks could easily be with the smaller farms that are running new kit. You're less likely to have backup equipment and are going to struggle getting priority from service teams when you're the smallest of ten customers that are broken down.
My point is that "new enough to have DRM depending on who you bought it from" machines represent the majority of heavy equipment out there in the US. There are plenty of old machine around but they're special purpose and spend a lot of time sitting around. The guy running a farm with a couple antique tractors or running a gravel pit with a collection of obsolete loaders is out there but he's a rounding error.
Soybeans and hay for cattle in Missouri. Together they run about 250 acres, probably a quarter of that is wooded but still a decent landmass to cover. And those farmalls are their daily drivers. I believe my dad’s got a newer one he uses for it’s pto for digging post holes and such. Those old tractors are workhorses, if you know how to take care of them and work on them yourself they’ll last forever.
250 acres is a small farm these days. Those old tractors can keep running on small farms for many more years if you care for them. Though upgrading to a newer used tractor may be worth it for the the greater fuel efficiency (you didn't say, but I'm guessing those are gasoline tractors, diesel was just starting to come out in that era)
Jeremy Clarkson is a multi-millionaire global celebrity, him investing maybe 5% of his money to own a bigger estate than most actual farmers is not a surprise.
And are these tractors used as their daily equipment or do they use something more modern by default and only bring the old stuff out on the rare occasions when the number of tractors doing tractor things is a big enough production bottleneck to warrant it?
I work on plenty of old junk for people. I know how this kind of stuff gets used and how important it is and isn't to business operations. There are a very tiny number of people who run large fleets of old junk with enough redundancy they are not lacking for uptime. These people are a rounding error compared to the number of people who have one or more new-ish machines and keep a couple pieces of old junk (usually very large or very niche machines) around for a particular use that the newer machines could cover but not as well as something dedicated. And this is how it works in pretty much any industry that uses heavy equipment, not just farming.