But when farmers A and B die, their heirs are still faced with the same situation. Farmer B's heirs have nothing to sell, but they do have the extra money that accumulated because of the compensation for resource depletion

The point is that the "Money" they now have is not "Value" - which equates to "something to sell" but its exact opposite - "anti-Value" ie a claim over Value or IOU issued by a credit intermediary aka a Bank, and backed by very little "Value" at all.

It's the difference between "Money" and "Money's Worth".

Ultimately everything gets equated with money and money has no value if there is nothing to spend it on.

Money has no Value, any more than a centimetre or a kilogram has a value. It MEASURES Value.

As John Law said

Money is not the Value for which Goods are exchanged, but the Value by which they are exchanged.

The farmers' problem writ large becomes the non-renewables vs renewables conundrum of "how do we finance renewables?"

And we do it by creating a "Pool" of future renewables energy production.

This "Pool" is a fund in which we may buy units (say MegaWatt/ Hrs or equivalent)by exchanging something of Value for them.

This fund then invests in renewable energy on the one hand and energy efficiency projects  - eg the roll out of Combined Heat and Power (CHP) networks - on the other.

These "investments" are in fact "energy loans" repayable over time in energy production at the market price, or - where energy savings have been financed - in payments made to the pool to repay the "energy loan", and financed by actual energy savings.

ie Joe Blow pays a Utility for the (reduced amount) of energy consumed, and the Pool for the energy loaned, until the loan is repaid.

In other words the "Pool" purchases future production of renewables and future flows of heat or energy savings at an agreed price, which may be a discount on today's price.

These streams of energy constitute "Value" or "Money's Worth", and if our farmers had exchanged their coal for units of future renewable energy, then they would have had something they COULD sell.

Similarly, there is the point that the farmers could have utilised their excess earnings to acquire the right to occupy farming land to replac what they had ruined.

This is where perhaps the most important form of Value comes in, and that is the right to occupy land over time.

It is this form of Value that in fact forms the backing for most of the "deficit-based" money currently in circulation, which came into existence through the creation of mortgage loans.

I believe that it is quite straightforward (REIT's are virtually there already)to create "Land Rental Pools" which have the potential to become a new and "fungible" asset class capable of forming something else that your farmers could sell.

The result would essentially be what people would regard as a land-backed Money: not a new idea - John Law put this forward in 1705

Money & Trade Consider'd

But he did rather f--k up the implementation in France with the Mississippi Bubble (which some would say led to the Louisiana Purchase and the modern USA).....

The bottom line is that we need to "Reverse the Polarity" of Money, and this IMHO is not just possible, but already beginning to happen.

"Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky