It's more like a way to trick farmers into producing food for you even though you don't right that second have something they want.
> 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.