Avoiding bread riots is why every single developed nation on Earth heavily subsidizes its farmers, even when they produce at a loss. The ones that didn't got regime changed by hungry, angry people.
Optimized systems tend to become non-resilient - fragile to external shocks. The last thing I want is a fragile system of food production and distribution.
It's better to pay extra into an inefficient system than deal with famines.
No one wants just-in-time, no-redundancies production of critical-to-life resources. You would be willing to subsidize a healthcare market to ensure hospitals didn’t have the exact supply of antibiotics on hand required “on average.” You wouldn’t want water purification plants to produce a market-optimum amount of water with no room for variation.
Why would you want that for your food supply?
Don’t get me wrong, there are other issues on hand - lack of diversification, oligopoly, etc. but the fundamental argument of “we subsidize critical resources because people die if there’s a shortage” isn’t a terrible idea.
That's not the argument, though. Government subsidies are intended as welfare programs for farmers. Far more food is currently produced than would ever be needed in the case of a shortage. We could produce a lot less and still be fine.
Also, 51.5 days of excess stocks is not 51.5 days of food on hand.
Would there be a benefit if we could support and subsidize commercial farms up to a certain size, and no larger, removing the compulsion for ultra-large, mass-industrialization of our agriculture industries?
I like it a lot. We might add a bit of an incentive for non-monoculture agriculture - different strains of wheat, for example. (There's some of that already, and we don't want all the smaller farms to do that, but some doing it might be a good idea.)
2. Driving without a seatbelt, or car insurance works, until it doesn't.
3. You'd probably be producing even more food/person, and be more resilient to market failure/drought/crop failures/etc were it subsidized.
1. According to my googling, the USA has 0.38 hectares of arable land per person, NZ has 0.14 per person.
You're aware only 2% of our land is arable compared to the USA's 16% right? Lots of mountains and hill country here.
The modern American life is very strongly predicated on cheap, abundant supply of _some_ kinds of nutrition (unhealthy for most, but still, something that prevents starvation even if it increases the chances of heart disease etc.)
Edit: Answered. Corn is used as a cattle feed and hence beef prices will be impacted. It will have a chain reaction pulling down just corn subsidies.
Tangent: India used to have famines and import grains until Punjab ushered a green revolution with record wheat and rice harvests in 1960s. My grandma told me how before wheat barley used to be the nutritional source, and I for nostalgia sake asked for a barley dish. Nearly threw up.
I like it as well, nevertheless.
If is the key point here. We've never been anywhere close to a famine despite our farmers operating in an unprotected market.