They answered this or something really similar to this in the kickstarter comments, I think it should hopefully answer your question:
It’s quite long:
“On the Farming Mini Game: The mini-game that we showed in the video was a super-quick prototype to test farming mechanics. It won’t look like that in game! Farming in game will look like this: http://i.imgur.com/Tn8FiPw.jpg We’re building these prototypes because it’s about 100x faster to try out new gameplay ideas in a cheap, throw-away version, then when we find something that is fun and awesome we go and implement it in the real game. Also, Derek says “I was hoping to see if there will be a way to not have the minigame so we can focus more on the simulation.” Derek, you’ll be happy to hear that the “minigame” is exactly dealing with farming-related simulations like water tables, nitrogen levels in the soil, and weather. It’s not at all like you’ll plant a farm and BAM! FARM-BASED-MINI-GAME pops up. Maybe the way we showed it in the video was deceiving. If this kind of deep simulation problem solving isn’t your thing, fear not!, you can just ignore all the complexity and do something basic. It means your farm will produce way less, but hey, you put in less work. Let me give a concrete example. MrMuddyPants loves farm games. I mean he LOOOOOVES them. His goal is to build big, prosperous fields and trade his extra crops for the other goods he needs. So MrMuddyPants spends a lot of time optimizing his farm layout, building irrigation pipes, paying close attention to the fertility levels of the soil, and rotating crops to take advantage of the seasons. He’s rewarded with bountiful crops year after year. YouMadBro, on the other hand, is all about building the biggest, baddest fortress on the block. He cares not a whit for farming, but still needs food. So he places a bunch of farm plots, assigns them a crop, and pretty much ignores them after that. His farms produce wayyyy less than MrMuddyPants’, but they consistently produce a meager, base level of food. If the two had similarly sized populations, YouMadBro would have to compensate by getting food from another source like hunting, trading, or plundering”
