This has been true for many, many decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer%27s_Wife_(1998_film...
Ditto Australia.
This is "normal" - clearing, ploughing, seeding are short intensive bursts, harvesting the same.
Much of the rest of the year it's maintaining equipment, fences, and twidding thumbs, except that's boring and unproductive and so there are "filler jobs" - running a small business (welding, rousting, wall building, landscaping), renting properties, etc.
It goes wider than farming; for decades most rural areas I've lived and worked in have had most of the locals having several overlapping jobs each - too few people, much to do, no one task takes up full time, etc.
I stayed with a succession of farmers while cycling across South Africa (with all the land fenced off, your only choice at the end of the day is finding a driveway and following it up to the farmhouse in order to ask for lodging), and what really impressed me was how much reading every one of these farmers was doing. Soil science and so forth is apparently a continually evolving field, and a modern farmer has no choice but to keep up with it. It really challenged my citybred prejudice of farmers as somehow uneducated.
It's big big business here even if the farms are still "family farms" .. the land parcels are larger with both owned and leased, there are houses on farm(s) to maintain, houses and shops in nearby rural town, semi industrial town lots for staging goods, silo's (six storey and higher buildings), rail heads, small fleets of giant machines, several millions in assets to manage, local, state, and federal politics to navigate.
The science side is Ag and soil, lots of GIS IT, asset tag systems for records (individual animals and seed plots, etc), robots, laser scanning for wool fibre, ... (long list).
These are not enterprises that can managed by idiots.
Crop farming, sure. Livestock farming? You basically can't leave. Can barely even do anything else.
Depends on the livestock - sheep, here at least, are mainly "check once a day" for the most part when set up properly.
Sure, you have drenching days, tagging days, etc but once the fences and water are in they're set and forget for most of the time in that most of the days in a cycle are mostly free to interleave in other activities.
Even cleanskin cattle (in the Northern Territory) fall into "keep an eye on them" and then there's a muster - there's work there for someone to keep the bores and yards up to spec and spending a few days here and there culling camels but, again, they tend to look after themselves on the right land - so much so that the pressing work is keeping them in check (via musters) so that they don't degrade the land.
> "Get big or get out" —ELB (ca.1971)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz#Secretary_of_Agricul...