A farmer and a landlord are different things. My family are farmers, I've been a landlord.
(FWIW, before anyone calls me a hypocrite, I paid back every renter every penny of profit I made from them plus appreciation.)
The labor that the farmer puts in should absolutely be rewarded. But the labor of a farmer is absolutely nothing like a landlord who makes money purely because they had enough money to buy housing. Plenty of landlords hire property management firms, and do little to no labor at all, but still make a profit.
That modality doesn't exist in farming and food the same way it does in housing today.
Why should labor be rewarded but not capital? Seems like an arbitrary distinction. Does your family allow anyone to farm and extract value from their land? No? Then they're no different than a landlord.
People mischaracterize the ease in which landlords make money. Take the past two years and eviction moratoriums for example. Landlords in the United States in many areas had to allow tenants to rent without being able to remove them for non-payment.
Landlords inherently have to be well capitalized in order to properly maintain the house as most individuals are not experts in all trades.
>before anyone calls me a hypocrite, I paid back every renter every penny of profit I made
I wouldn't have called you a hypocrite even if you didn't pay back anything. Living in the real world™ doesn't mean you can't criticise it. If we can't challenge things we take part in, how do we improve anything?
> purely because they had enough money to buy housing
The nominal assumption is that they must have earned that by providing someone with something of value to them. The money they receive is a formal/cultural recognition of their indebtedness -- that they have provided something useful but have not receive anything of material value in return. Money is a way of claiming something useful in return for something they had provided, but separated in time and place.
Of course this is the theoretical and intended mechanism. It does get subverted in many ways when one earns money without providing anyone with anything materially useful. Inheritance can be interpreted as one such. Although it can be interpreted charitably too -- dont compensate me for the goods and services I provided , I am dead, compensate Saul instead.
The labor that the farmer puts in should absolutely be rewarded. But the labor of a farmer is absolutely nothing like a landlord who makes money purely because they had enough money to buy housing. Plenty of landlords hire property management firms, and do little to no labor at all, but still make a profit.
That modality doesn't exist in farming and food the same way it does in housing today.