Something like 80% of the people who farm for a living would agree with you.
It is the part-time and hobby farmer who is anxious for his annual stipend from the government for not growing whatever it is that he had no intention of growing in the first place.
Unfortunately, in the referenda that inform many farm policies, it is "one farmer-one vote". An Oklahoma wheat farmer working 1200 acres has no more say about grain programs than an Ohio gentleman farmer raising 12 A of oats for his horses.
Add in the agribusiness lobbyists in pursuit of pork and the farm state legislators in pursuit of perks...and you have the formula for a programmatic disaster.
That is one suggestion that has real merit!
I'm one of the guilty ones that sold out a few years ago from this same area. I, too, lived in Nuckolls county, just outside Lawrence, on my granddaddy's old homestead that he proved right after the civil war. I know the region well.
The gubmint taxed me off my land. When wheat and corn still sells for essentially the same price it did back in the 1930s but the cost of everything else is at least ten times higher, it's an adversarial economic situation.
Government subsidies just made the situation worse, because the big boys were the only ones to get any relief from it, and those taxes just kept going up. To top it all off, the government stepped in during the war years and froze the price of hogs at $0.06 per pound. It was impossible to raise porkers at that price even if you had free feed.
It would have been difficult enough to maintain the agricultural lifestyle just battling the natural economic realities, but when the knot-headed government made and keeps making the most unreasonable tax demands and crop regulations, it's time to run for your life.