1.Micromanagement time drops.
I'm one of those people who avoids farming until all the fish have run out and all the animals/berries are gone. The problem with this approach is you have to keep moving your boats and foragers/hunters to new spots. This can take a fair amount of micromanagement if you have dozens of boats and villies (as I usually do). I always try to keep track of villies and check on my economy regularly but sometimes it can become a real hassle, specially in intense games, to keep going back to move the fishing boats around.
Now, all a player faced with this problem has to do is lay out a single set of farms in bronze or whenever, group them and just regularly press (random group #) and S. That frees you up to concentrate on battles, woodies/goldies and so on.
2.Makes farming a more viable and "accurate" (?) food source. I've always been puzzled by the fact that farms were, according to tests, one of the slowest methods of gathering food and only contained a relatively small amount of food. Eles, packs of gazelle, fish all carry equivelant amounts or more in food and each one is faster to gather (not counting boat fishing). I was always under the impression that farming HELPED human beings settle down, gain stable and more productive means of food collection and advance to civilization. I remember, LOOONNG ago (newbie days from a year ago), playing a game with someone from ES and wondering WHY they were hunting in Iron age! "So primitive," I though. Hehe I should specify I'm not in favor of the bug or of cheating, viz, you use it without letting other people know. I think "replenishment of farms" is, in theory, not a bad idea at all. I believe it's going to be present in AoK. Maybe the bug was a feature that ES decided to leave out of the game or something. Dunno.
Just my thoughts.
J.