Nothing is clouding the issue. You are fabricating a contrived scenario which doesn’t exist today. The “surplus” is what producers use to pay back the loans th

Nothing is clouding the issue. You are fabricating a contrived scenario which doesn’t exist today. The “surplus” is what producers use to pay back the loans they took out to be able to produce as much as they currently do. If they produce no “surplus”, they are trying to build a simple subsistence production which is not feasible in a modern society. No bank will loan them money and they can’t afford to insure against bad weather/crop/prices. They can’t produce large enough yields to benefit from Economies of Scale, so they work long hours using low tech and have small yields which have to compete against the high yields of their industrial-scale neighbors, so they make little return on their hard toil. You are trying to remove free market mechanics without any discernible reason. For the same reason that most farms/ranches today are big industrial operations (at least in the USA where regulations permit it), small subsistence producers can’t make a living and die off unless they can find a brand niche. The same would happen in this hypothetical future where whatever event you think happened would drive subsistence farmers into bankruptcy and lead to consolidation.