As long as users are prepared to pay the put costs, I’m not worried about farmers. If the put cost is high enough to make the farmer some money, they will come. If still they don’t, community members can, as can maidsafe.
Having too much data demand and too little storage supply is a good problem to have, imo. It can be easily addressed. However, not having users and good data is a much tougher and much more important problem to tackle.
Ofc, the put price has to be competitive though, which is really what storj is subsidising here. They are making it artificially cheap to send data through their gateway, to cement their market position as the middleman of choice. While farmers will get paid, their rates haven’t been cut too (although presumably storj dcs could add their own farmers?).
The safe network equivalent to this approach is subsidising put costs, making it cheaper for users to store data. As I said in the link above, I’m not against that tactic, as high put costs could deter good data. Such subsidies would also feed directly into the network, not some maidsafe controlled gateway or some such.