Well, even in the mid 80s for example when many universities and their CS departments were heavily into DIY in house software development, none of them were expected to write all of the software used by all of the university. Ordinary workstation platforms were still purchasing MS-DOS 3.3 licenses with their hardware or Mac OS with their macs, etc. And things like Microsoft Office, Wordperfect.

Universities which do have large agriculture/farming related departments often operate their own small scale test/development/experimental farm.