You said it yourself: for a living.

Growing food with a main goal of profits in a private enterprise rather than just sustenance or profit through government grants without private market interference has a lot of downsides, including to farmers themselves.

For example, optimisation for profit means a lot of waste:

• Perfectly healthful produce with aesthetic faults has to be left to rot on the ground as it won’t sell and nobody’s going to collect it for those that need it but can’t afford to pay the “market price”

• If you have an exclusive deal with a grocery store or other intermediary, the excess of an unexpectedly good crop yield will likewise in most cases have to be destroyed because the buyer can’t receive all of it and you’re not allowed to sell to their competitors.

• Likewise, any excess of a particular good harvest across a crop will also be destroyed to avoid losing money on the market value of the crop dropping due to increased supply.

All of this while a few megacorps sit between farmers and consumers paying the same or less to farmers and charging much more of consumers while the cost of living and business expenses of farmers keep rising, making it harder and harder to make ends meet if you’re the aforementioned megacorps.

And that’s not even mentioning all the issues of long hours and some of the worst working conditions of any industry, all to save a buck or two to stave off bankruptcy and eventually starvation for a little longer while the megacorps and their billionaire owners and executives gobble up almost all the value of what you produce.