Farming is somehow still regarded as being some mom-and-pop heartland thing rather than the highly optimized manufacturing operation it has been for decades. Direct farm employment is now just 1.2% of the population. It was 40% in 1900. The special treatments farms and farmers get is an outdated relic kept alive by the electoral college.

It’s because it’s still mom and pop because 72% of farms are still fully owned by people but they tend to be smaller in size and only account for 30% of the total farm land. And majority of farms are still under a 1000 acre size. The problem is that there are about 27000 farms that are hyper giants of 5000+ acres which are the consolidated operations that account for a huge portion of the US farmland.

Also, farming is mom and pop highly optimized operation. Those two don’t need to be separate things. Once you understand that running a farm can be hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions, you can understand the disconnect.

There is a lot of national security benefit to propping up the domestic agricultural industry. We've probably overstepped that line, but just "leave it to the free market" is a really bad option, too.

Unfortunately "the farmers" is simply a marketing gimmick along the lines of "the children". It is used to evoke a specific image and implied set of ideals. And because of that we have to deal with all kinds of crap legislation tied to it.

Yes, cannot emphasize this enough. Farming is an industry, and we have take it seriously as one and stop romanticizing it.

Of course, the irony is that now we romanticize industry too.

The special treatment of farmers is about food security. We generally trust farmers to keep delivering us food and we're willing to allow them a lot of special treatment because of that.

The highly optimized manufacturing operation has made farming into a powerful tool of statecraft internationally. Other countries become dependent on our beans and corn to [indirectly] feed their people or for inputs for their own industries. That gives us diplomatic leverage.

Once you start thinking about that, a lot of the mystery or 'inefficiency' of farming in the USA makes more sense. For example, the subsidies to grow corn and soy but not kale and squash or whatever was in the article- growing kale and squash isn't a strategic priority.

> an outdated relic kept alive by the electoral college.

And yet, farmers are a vocal and critical political bloc in every other EU country, too.

Farming is just important. Not as much because it employs a large portion of the population, but because it keeps a large portion of the population alive. It is the original industry that's "too big to fail" - if you let it, you get famine.

The country wouldn't even exist without the electoral college. It was pivotal in uniting the states under a federal government, and is working as intended. Maybe the USA should be abandoned, and all ties between the states renegotiated, but you shouldn't be able to unilaterally change the terms of the deal.