Some villagers are adopting the farmer profession, and are "working" at the composter stations, but they are not harvesting crops nor distributing food.
Prior to the 1.16 update, farmers would work, harvest crops, and distribute food amongst the villagers.
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Can confirm this behavior on Bedrock Windows 10 edition as well. This problem only happens if the farmer can both pathfind to, and actually reach, their workstation. If you place the composter someplace where the villager can pathfind to it (on the other side of some trapdoors that prevent them from physically reaching the composter, they will then share their food supply with other villagers.
The not harvesting crops bug is being tracked here: MCPE-80084
This does not address the failure to distribute food once they do have food in their inventory, though. The following tutorial video actually provides a work around to this bug explicitly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6D4fTRUpQ4
It is unclear if this only affects "new" 1.16 farmers, or if worlds that have been upgraded from previous versions will experience the same problem with existing farmer villagers. (As Bedrock does not provide an easy way to roll back to earlier versions, this scenario is quite difficult to test from the player side.)
Additionally, it looks like farmers will only share food when attempting to pathfind to their workstation. (Again, this is behavior shown in the linked video in my previous comment.) If the composter that the farmer is attempting to pathfind to is not next to the villager that needs food, the farmer will never seek them out to share food with them, even if they are within a short range and have both a path and line of sight.
@@unknown: thanks for providing more information and testing this issue. I've watched the video, tested it myself, and also looked at the vanilla behavior pack. At this point I'm not convinced there is an additional bug here beyond the harvesting bug tracked at MCPE-80084. What I think you've found, instead, are some helpful tips for the design of automatic crop farms. I was able to get farmers to share food when their composters were not next to another villager, and when they had no workstation at all. Putting the composter over the other villager where the farmer cannot reach it just makes the farm more efficient.
It's important to keep in mind that villager behavior is designed around naturally generated villages. In the vanilla behavior pack sharing is a very low-priority behavior--lower than working, harvesting crops, and most other things villagers can do. The radius for targeting other villagers to share with is also very short (3 blocks). This results in farmers in a naturally-generated village sharing food mostly during the afternoon gathering time. That's usually enough to get food distributed to allow the population to grow or recover from an assault. Also, if it weren't coded this way, farmers would end up not refreshing trades and not harvesting consistently, or maybe even not going to bed! A naturally generated village has to balance all of these behaviors. It probably should not surprise that when you want to exploit game mechanics to make highly efficient farms, you may need set things up in ways that look unnatural.
Thank you for the additional information; I know in my own creative test world I would not have seen this due to my testing conditions which would have artificially induced the observed "incorrect" behavior. I will update my testing and re-open a new bug if I find something reproducible under the conditions you outlined!
do you have the gamerule mobgreifing turned off?