As a control systems engineer, I believe the market should be free to choose its direction, but not its rates of change.
If gasoline makers want to raise prices, they should be allowed to do that at their discretion, but, if they feel that they need to raise prices too quickly (more than 1% per day?) then there should be something in-place to penalize that - perhaps an increase in profits taxing for the coming 2 years? Prices need to rise 50% in 2 weeks, sure, go ahead and do that, but if you end up making an (accidental) increased profit as a result of your "over limit" price increase, you can pay back all of that profit increase and a penalty in taxes. Price gouging on cornerstone commodities isn't good for anyone but shareholders in the commodities sellers who are doing the gouging.
Same thing could apply in the farming markets, allow people to make choices, encourage them to invest and improve, but discourage rapid changes that could lead to a "farming crash." If people want to grow more corn this year, fine - sign up to grow corn. When corn growing is up by more than 10 or 20% (or whatever makes sense), put on some kind of damper to make other choices more attractive.
We all have "free will," the right to travel, assemble, etc., but if we all decide to go to Rhode Island on the same day, it's going to cause a problem or two. In the case of physical presence, the physical world has effective controls - limited rooms for rent, limited seats on flights, limited number of cars that can physically fit in the state, etc. People would back off and turn around before it got really bad like running out of food and water / sewage in the streets kind of bad. Unfortunately, economic games don't have this kind of feedback, so we get some pretty spectacular crashes, even with "good government meddling" to smooth out the worst of the shocks - especially with "bad government meddling" (i.e. 2005-2008 real estate market.)