Relocating a crophopper on a working farm usually causes a mess with the crops that you have to manually cleanup.

I think the server should temporarily allow more than 1 crophopper to be placed in the chunk. With the consequence that no profit would generate from that chunk until you remedy the problem. But no crops would grow because the crophoppers are present in the chunk.

This would allow you to place a new crophopper in the new location, and then remove the old one, without the crops causing a mess.

 

Hello, MyCoffee…it’s a huge problem, I support a fix! Even if it is just reset at restart, so crophoppers start collecting again, though I like your idea better.

 

I've done this using two accounts. One, attempting to place the new cropper using autoclicker and another to remove the existing cropper.
The new cropper is placed, almost instantly when he old one is removed.
A bit more of a fiddle than your suggestion but something to use in the meantime.

 

i think having a curtasy grace period of say ten seconds or something after breaking a cropper, could be an idea. this gives a player time to break croppers that have been turned off from missing tax payment, and to place them back again without crops growing in their island sized farms.

this is also a cool idea