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Hmm, maybe I was wrong about him needing a thread. He gets funnier the deeper you go.
Farm subsidies are a bad idea. They prop up large corporations, and encourage people to waste resources by planting crops that will never be harvested. This also affects the diet since things like corn, soy and sugar are put into everything as a result of them being cheap.
Not so much. They are both a blessing and a curse tbh. On one side, when you have farm subsidies you give people and families an incentive to stay in the countryside making a living, so all your population doesn't end up in the city living like half starved hobos scrounging for jobs with which they will be able to barely pay rent. As well, you ensure that you can have plenty of food and affordable prices for everyone so they get fed and both ends winning as a result (tho this could be achieved inf farmers sold directly to their community instead of needing to rely on middlemen, who take around 60-70% of the profits. Buy your food locally always). Also there are a lot of side benefits, like active foresting activity and side jobs being actively created as a consequence (like plague control, hunting, veterinarians...), control on the status of local fauna and less brush fires since the land is usually cleared of underbush.
But it also has it's downsides and not only the ones you say. Most farm subsidies are given in accordance to the amount of land the owner has. And of course, the more land the owner has the richer he is by default. This makes the rich farmers considerably richer while the poor farmers are kept afloat by a thin margin. As well, industrial farming (the one that takes up most subsidies) is the one that tends to be more destructive to the ecosystem compared to small farms, since industrail farming requires enormous amounts of resources to keep on churning goods (if you wonder why there are water shortages in California, this is the answer). As well, in order to keep everything balanced out you will need to put quotas in the market (like the EU does) because you don't want the farmer to earn peanuts for his work, but at the same time you don't want to fleece the consumer. Therefore, you need to put a balance between demand and supply. This was the way many diary farms in Europe were forced to close forever because they couldn't sell their products and they didn't had enough money to scrap the whole project and start anew.
This is all i can recount by the EU's agrarian policy (which chugs roughly 60% of the EU's money btw). I'm sure there are many other things to consider, but overall... It's good and bad.
I have a family member who was a bigwig at the Canadian Wheat Board, and she gave me this perspective...
Subsidies killed the family farm in Canada. But not subsidies in Canada, in the US. Commodity markets under FTA and then NAFTA being essentially borderless (the wheat board was around it softened the effect, since the wheat board was essentially a mini, Canadian OPEC for crops... basically a trading cartel.)
I can't remember the crop she showed me, maybe cornn, but it went like this: if corn is $5 a bushel on the market, it was the same for Canadian and American farmers. But at $5 a bushel, the market is artificially deflated. Profit margins are nonexistent or incredibly slim. Come in subsidies for US farmers, and what they actually see is $7 per bushel, $2 being subsidies. Canadian farmers can no longer compete in that scenario, except by becoming larger and larger and practicing worse longterm farming to get the most in the short term.
At the same time, input costs don't scale linearly. If you farm 1000 acres, your costs are say $200,000 and your final crop sells for $250,000 (no idea of real numbers), but if you farm 10,000 acres, your input costs are only $1,500,000 and the final crop still sells for $2,500,000. At a 1000 acres, you make $50,000, but if your farm is ten times the size, you make twenty times the profit.
The market can stay deflated for years to slowly whittle out the smaller farms, though. If the final crop is only worth $150,000 for the small guy, he goes bankrupt, whereas that price is the break even point for the large farmer. Subsidies make it worse, since the large farms can now actually make money when the input costs are higher han what the market pays, while the smaller farms can't.
Not sure if that's really completely true, but it seemed pretty convincing to me.