Wait till you realize that any form of money is a scam designed to extort riches from the poorest producers and make those riches climb the social pyramid. Tongue in cheek comment of course, but that's an argument that can be defended.
I don't think that's it. They have to do it because they themselves have bills to pay. However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt. So it's not exactly a facilitator of mutually-beneficial transactions, but rather a pyramid scheme. Who will profit from the food sale? The middlemen. Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc..
astrange had the right context but characterized it not-so-correctly. Modern agriculture's origin involved power structures where farmers were forced to be unable to be self-reliant, and would instead trade their crops at a market to get the other things they needed. The powers that be then had a nice, centralized place to take their cut and exchanges to offramp goods into currency. we're seeing it all over again with crypto via fiat reliance
Farmers didn't have bills to pay prior to the invention of bills though; some of them were subsistence farmers, some ran on IOUs, and some were slaves.
> However, if we're not talking about big industrial farms, most farmers are very much below the poverty line and have massive debt.
Median family farmer in the US is a millionaire (or their household is anyway). You're thinking of farmworkers.
> Who will profit from the little money that the farmer pockets? Banks, Monsanto, etc..
This is 70s New Leftism "evil corporations" thought, but it's a bad approach. Small business owners (petit bourgeois / local gentry) are more evil than corporations. Farmers, who are largely a kind of landlord, extra so.
For instance, the reason factory farms took over poultry in the US is that chickens were originally not valuable because there wasn't a market for chicken meat for the longest time. So the farmers left it to their wives to run.
Once it became popular, all the farmers sold their businesses to the factory farms, because having no business was less embarrassing than letting a woman run one.
