Hey there @BoostedCR24! As you’d already found out, the landscape system isn’t meant to be changed much at runtime. Material changes are generally fine, but when it comes to trying to manipulate the terrain itself, I’d usually recommend Voxels for high terrain modification, or rolling your own deformation with procedural meshing.
As for crops, most users tend to use Instanced Static Mesh(ISM) or Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes (HISM) for crops or interactable (like resource nodes) trees, rocks, etc. This makes it easier to render tons of them, and you can handle them via one location. However It does make it a bit harder to do special mechanics with them due to their limited nature.