Any ideas of what this may be like? I've seen discussion on smithing and woodcutting but not much on farming. What can be done to not make this activity a "one off" and become tedious and mundane really quick?

There's farming in the game?

I don't know how to pull that one off. I would rather hunt.

Yea well smithing is an actual skill now but there are side activities like woodcutting which can be seen in the trailer and I read there will also be mining and farming.

I have been wondering myself, the simple one is that you harvest plants for ingredients and food like in Oblivion.

The cool one is that you take a shovel make a mound access it and add some ingredient who grow to a plant, I have something like this in Oblivion, yes I can plant hadera and it will attack anything, once they killed a deer.
Downside it that you can not plant outside your house as you has to be away three days before plants respawn. I hope respawn work better in Skyrim,

More realistic you buy a farmhouse and some of the upgrades is plots with various plants you can harvest.

But since you could already do that in Oblivion how will it differ in Skyrim enough to be considered its own activity in farming?

Same here So would alot of other people from a Topic I had early on. stats

I just hope there is a nice amount of variety and farming isn't just a simple activity with no depth. Interested to see/hear more of it.

They can keep it simple. Leave harvesting like oblivion, but allow you to go around town buying up farms. I can't think of much else you can add to farming.

They could include Fable 2 style mini-games where you cut wood, load up carts, milk cows etc.

Don’t expect much depth and see it mostly as a way to boost alchemy. That made the farming mod interesting was that I could plant rare plants for alchemy.

And yes I expect more than just harvesting as in Oblivion, it was worst case.