While corporate farming gets trotted out as the Boogeyman anytime subsidies are discussed, and is indeed an issue, there's still a lot of non-corporate farming.

While corporate farming gets trotted out as the Boogeyman anytime subsidies are discussed, and is indeed an issue, there's still a lot of non-corporate farming. And it's a hard life. You go into debt to buy machinery and raw materials (seed, fertilizer, pesticide) you need to generate competitive yields... Then it doesn't rain. Or it rains too much. Or the weather is too good in Asia, depressing the global price. And all it takes is a few years of the above, and the bank is foreclosing on property that may have been handed down to you through generations of family, How does that make you feel as a person? And even if everything goes right, what does worrying about that constantly do to you? Farm subsidies are a messy business, fraught with peril, but farmers can't just up and move like most of us. So I'm not unsympathetic to the underlying compassionate goal (even if the realization may be perverted). I guess the closest analogy for many would be being a web dev, if browsers decided to randomize their compatibility with all standards every year. And you needed to take out a loan for a laptop and tooling.