I'm no historian or anthropologist so I'm just making things up here. But, I would guess that it's not significantly easier than the hunter-gatherer that still exist. Mostly because I think otherwise they wouldn't have switched to farming. The hunter-gathers that exist nowadays may lack formal education, but that doesn't mean they're all complete idiots. Somewhere in the last 30000 years some of them must have figured out that plants grow on the place you drop seeds. They haven't switched to farming because it wasn't worth the effort. Of course this is complicated by the issue that the amount of effort it takes to farm also varies from place to place. I'd guess farming is very hard in the desert. In the jungle farming is also difficult if you don't have durable (i.e steel) implements to cut down hardwood trees. But given the climate hunting and gathering year round seems relatively easy there. The fertile crescent has relatively easy farming, but enough seasonal changes to make year round hunting-gathering much more risky.