It's only when disaster strikes they begin to realise that maybe they should do things a little differently.
But by then of course it's far too late.
New Zealand's traditional open pasture farming and the impact on it locally of last week's rain bomb is a case in point.
Now, I freely admit I wouldn't be a farmer for quids.
Apart from the fact it's bloody hard work, you're constantly at the mercy of the elements, which can make or break you and your business literarily overnight.
So judging the weather and its likely impact on your spread is a high-priority fascination for those who steward the land.
But that fascination seems one of mute acceptance rather than proactive mitigation - an attitude also reflected in farmers' views on man-made climate change.
I don't mean to appear to be kicking a man while he's down, and I know a lot of good folk are hurting right now, but the point needs to be driven home while the scars are fresh if it's to be grasped and accepted.
That if you denude the land of supporting vegetation and deplete soils of their natural biomass, then it should be no surprise when that land crumbles away the first time a severe weather event happens.
Especially if, as is generally the case in Hawke's Bay, the topsoil layer is what is best described as thin in the first place.
Look at the pictures of the massive slippages down a vast number of hillsides as a result of the rain bomb. Do you see any trees? No.
What you see is steep bare slopes that had no stabilising root systems to hold the soil in place or suck up some water to lessen the saturation.
Slopes that, moreover, are constantly being further destabilised by the passage of stock across them.
When the deluge struck the weight of water absorbed by those slopes simply proved too much for the soil alone to hold. And down it came.
The dumbest part of this is that there's both no reason and no excuse for it. It's only 23 years since Cyclone Bola washed half the East Cape's farms into the sea.
You would think that that lesson was both still fresh enough, and the intervening decades time enough, for farmers to have planted sufficient stabilising trees across such slopes as to now offer some defence against erosion.
But no. Even when the government has an afforestation scheme running as part of a drive to store carbon credits and farmers have opportunity to plant out hillsides for free, many still apparently choose to ignore the chance and remain at significant risk.
All for the sake of having a bit more land that is, at best, only ever 60 per cent as productive as rolling or flat pasture anyway.
And, once it has slipped, that reduces to something like 40 per cent - and that's after the 20 or 30 years that slip scars take to recover, even with careful management.
Add to that the huge cost of lost production on the flats as well - where the hills have dumped their sodden motley loads of spill - and surely you must conclude that the risks far outweigh the benefits.
Especially as the climate is changing, and these events will become more commonplace.
Why, then, is government paying out financial assistance to those who are so blinkered as to not take preventative measures and actually sustainably manage their land instead of thoughtlessly abusing it?
That's paying people not to learn. In their case, the only thing such assistance sustains is environmental crime.
That's the right of it.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
