I travel to South Dakota once or twice a year, where I visit family and friends who are either farmers or the family of farmers.
When I am there, I constantly see examples where math is used. For example, when I was checking some cattle, a family friend showed me where he used a GPS to navigate a carefully planned route that was perfected to almost the level of an Escher. This does not require the common mathematic skill set, but it certainly requires a working knowledge of how things fit together--something that can be reinforced by mathematics training.
Now, one can find the area of this field in two ways. For farming, it is sufficient to multiply the distance one travels along this spray path by the width covered by each pass. If you need to be more accurate, you can split up the land into sections with easily calculable areas, such as semicircles and squares.
However, what if the field in question had to be measured very accurately? Then, one might need some vector calculus and find the line integral.
Just easy math in every farmers' daily work
You know, I never thought about it before, but I should never be a farmer because I probably would try to be too perfect with things like that....