The real risks are when the mega corporate farm goes bankrupt. Then all the smaller farms are gone. Better to have 500 farms in a county with busy bulk milk tankers running the roads, than two farms in a county with 50 bulk tank semi's parked by the holding tanks.
Yeah, you definitely need to run deeper when the ground has frost, or is just plain cloddy, especially on rolling ground.
When I quit farming in 2001 and went OTR trucking, one of my first feed hopper loads went from ADM Galesburg to a feed mill in Poy Sippi, just south of Waupaca county. Picked up my backhaul of partially processed dead livestock near Berlin at (then) National By-products. That stuff would be ground to powder at NBP’S finishing plant in tiny Lynn Center, IL. Loads from there went primarily to pet food plants around the mid west.
Mega farms are going to be a disaster when the globulleestas pull the plug.
I have looked at old aerial photos of farms on the Vintage Aerial photos website. The old neighborhood (south central Mercer county, IL) has seen about half of the farmsteads vanish since the mid 60s. Hardly any fences any more as well. Sad.
But even those small farms had been heavily reliant on petro fuel since the 30s and 40s. The Amish are ready, maybe not for a massive flood of hungry people leaving the cities looking for food.