People like to believe that there is something special about farms, and something special about the people who run them (farmers). Many people have an irrational romantic notion about the countryside, and therefore about the farming profession. In fact farms are just companies (and frequently quite large companies) which produce food.
Keeping people ignorant of this fact has been greatly beneficial to the farming industry, and portraying farmers alternatively as struggling peasants or the backbone of the country has gained many subsidies from the rest of the population.
The fact is that modern farming is a skilled profession, requiring many and varied skills, and most farmers are successful businessmen. They have to content with risks, uncertainty and market variations, just like every other business.
Farmers may have to deal with natural conditions such as floods and droughts. But weather cycles are well understood, and farming is a business which requires considerable capital (enough to carry at least two years of losses). But this is not a reason to subsidize farming. Other businesses also require years of investment before turning profits, and there are few popular calls to subsidize them.
Frequently there are emotional arguments about farmers going broke en-mass, and the rest of the population starving from the resultant food shortages. A little thought reveals the idiocy of this argument. As more and more farmers stopped farming their land, food (currently in world-wide surplus) would become scarce, and the price would increase. The increase in price would make the remaining farms more profitable, and the bankruptcies would cease. As usual, the market is the best controller.
There are also emotional appeals about people having to leave their farms after three generations of farming. Strangely no-one offers subsidies to businessmen who lose their factories after three generations of ownership.
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