Yes, they have. It’s just that they interact through money and corporations. Consumers buy cheap from corporations and the corporations buy cheaper from the farmers. When threatened with issues of farm insolvencies, government throws money at the system, and it sticks to the corporations while it slides off the farmers into the banks that are never paid off. Consumers don’t have to be in the physical presence of a farmer to ‘interact’ with them. That’s the true urban-rural divide: it’s paved with money and all of the things of a monetarily-governed society, while the farm still requires the things that are not of money in order to function: labor, creativity, presence.

Urban consumers don’t have to be present to get what they want. They just have to spend money on it.