Most of the actual farming is done by small individual farmers regardless of who owns the land or what the financial arrangements are. Nobody gets rich farming

While this is the "world wide" situation I was solely talking about US based agricultural production. In the corporate area those "individual farmers" are considered either employees of the larger entity or external contractors/vendors beholden to much of the operational liabilities with little to show for in terms of the benefits reaped by their parent organizations. Now the CEOs and board members of those big agricultural companies.. they do get very rich off of the activities performed.

Nobody gets rich farming.

Well that is a loaded statement, while it may apply to most individual farmers the mega corps like Simplot etc with billion dollar revenue streams are a wholly other matter. The founder of Simplot got very rich doing farming and agricultural work.

Small farms are inefficient and require much much more input to equal production as modern farms.

That was the whole point about the economies of scale I was talking about before and why the subsidies benefited the small farmers... they cant compete with each other let alone with the mega corps without them. When we had more independent producers with no price floor(subsidies) the product equilibrium price on the market was below its production costs for the median size producer.

Large corporate producers... they have economies of scale on their side to a very large degree and really do not need the subsidies to be profitable and to make ends meet... having the subsidies around is great for their bottom line though.

As for the romanticizing bit... I wasn't doing anything of the sort... I was talking about market function and how the various controls relate to them and revenue streams alongside business sustainability factors.