I haven't ever seriously grown anything, so I admit not knowing much about commercial agriculture operations, but what I was thinking about was the following ki

I haven't ever seriously grown anything, so I admit not knowing much about commercial agriculture operations, but what I was thinking about was the following kind of tradeoff: You can do one thing (e.g. one crop) very efficiently, if that is the only thing you do, by standardising the operation and using efficient machinery and industrial processes. The downside is that you have all your eggs in the same basket, and compared to growing several crops, the risks are much higher. When it comes to pruning, weeding and harvesting, a sufficiently smart autonomous robot could do those just as well without everything perfectly flat and in evenly spaced rows. However, it is currently much easier and cheaper to do a "stupid" machine that works only in the controlled environment.