Yeah, I know a few sets of small-farmers. While there's certainly a lot of big-money abuse of the system for agribusiness and breaks on real estate, some of those government programs help: the problem is that most of it, even a lot of price support, goes to agribusiness profit margins, not the farmers.
Some of the programs actually are really important to keep those small outfits going and partly have served to keep some farmland arable rather than a site for more sprawl and real estate speculation, (But I suppose even that's been something, even if it's kind of not really what the subsidies/tax breaks are for, when it comes to some of this.)
Some areas just get these exemptions to various purposes, but funny enough, if we get our house in a suitable locale, I've actually been kind of planning on a bit of small-scale agriculture: whatever I can keep up with. Some of my farming-friends have offered me hop vines: I think it'd be nice to grow em on a nice big grape arbor: they can provide some shade and I could do a lot of the tending there. A hen or three, some angora bunnies for the wool... Greenhouse for sweetie's herbs and seedlings.... Sweetie's talking about a goat, even. I like goats, but will I be up to regular milkings... I dunno.
And if there happens to be a little patch of land I might offer the use of it to some friends better able to grow something on there. Like they aren't busy enough,but something might work out to be worthwhile.
So, you never know, could be a little small-scale agriculture on such a plot after all.
It's hard to make a living with a small farm, but it always seems there's a little more that someone could do.
There's one little place that is somewhere not near our friends which would be just lovely for stuff like this. (Though, hrm, I have an underemployed friend in the area who might just be able to grow some veggies there on a 'You do most of the work, you get most of the take' basis.
)
Or I could end up hiring some of that migrant day-labor. Or hippies. Heh. That'd be a piece of irony. I actually tried doing some of that work when I was particularly-poor... I was really sick, anyway, but I didn't last five minutes out in that Sun.
Anyway, the land-subsidies thing is pretty messed-up: you should see how much some of the GOP in Congress actually cash huge checks from it, without growing so much as a bean sprout.
Little doc called 'Food, Inc' gets into a lot of how this agribusiness and stuff works.