If they're living off welfare, we're living off the reduced food prices that welfare provides. It's effectively a regressive subsidy to those who most need it, low-income households for whom food is a significant expense.

I come from a suburbanized semi-rural area, and farms and dairies are shutting down all the time because it's not profitable. It's not like they're living large on government largess, at least not at the local farm level with a few square miles of land or a hundred dairy cows.

Aside from the fact that it would be more efficient to just give people money or food, a significant part of farm subsidy comes in the form of import tariffs and minimum guaranteed prices that force food prices up, not down. Furthermore these barriers have the insidious effect of keeping developing economies from participating in the global economy because their farm goods are untradeable. If you think farmers have it tough here, check out rural Guatemala.

I understand your emotional attachment to farming as a lifestyle. The farm lobby trades on this heavily ("my family has been growing sugar beets for eight generations, we need the subsidies!"). Change happens. The sooner we get the kinds of changes that stop farmers from growing rice growing in California, the better.