Couldn’t an enemy army just march around the castle and take all of the unfortified farmland/resources? Also couldn’t a castle just be sieged out until the defenders starve?
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If you march around the castle, you now have an army behind you. This is a problem.
If you try to starve them out, you could be there for months. Your army does not want to sit around for that long. You probably don’t have the supplies and even if you do it means a lot of time spent not doing anything when time is a very limited resource (professional troops will need paying, any militias you’ve called up are going to want to get back to their actual jobs ASAP and in many places it’s just not possible to keep an army marching around during winter) If any of their mates show up to help them you’re going to get caught between the castle and another army. This is also a problem.
So while you can just ignore them, and sometimes it works, often you’ve only really got three options if they don’t feel like surrendering. You can leave just enough people behind to keep them penned up (which means you now have fewer soldiers with you, and those soldiers left behind are screwed if a real army comes to help out those under siege), you can storm the castle (which is going to get a lot of your soldiers killed) or you can accept this is as far as you go and settle in for a long siege (which is still likely to get a lot of people killed. Disease and starvation are going to be very dangerous to both sides).
In reality actual siege warfare, and large scale warfare in general, tended to be the exception in the castle era. Most medieval conflicts were more like border raids. March into an undefended village, steal everything not nailed down, burn what you can’t take and leg it before the other side shows up. And try to stop them doing the same thing to your villages.
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