Farming can be incredibly profitable one year and incredibly loss making the next - all dependant on this thing called the weather. And you could argue that some of the subsidies are to keep the price of bread/ milk/ whatever etc, the same no matter what the harvest. Farming as a business is a terrible gamble with very big numbers involved and to spend hundreds of thousands on drilling a crop then hoping for kind weather is not my idea of a business model.
Now I'm not going to enter into some contest about how many farmers I've met, worked for or known, but I will say that in my experience (which is mostly arable) the farmers I have known are far more technologically ahead than us in the construction industry, are doing more for conservation than the entirety of the national trust, and yet some years still struggle to make a profit if the weather is bad.
And yes they pretty much all have scrap round the back of the barns but when you really need to fix something mid harvest - the amount of times we've played scraphead challenge and won by keeping said £100,000 machine going with old metal because the parts were a couple of days out - I'd say the scrap more than pays for itself. Yes it can get excessive and look unsightly, but when you really need something the same day its worth its weight in gold.
The above support for farmers does not mean that they don't need to modernise, indeed, many are still farming as they did in the 60's and unfortunately for them, as the tractor revolutionised practices back then, I feel the reform of subsidies will do the same to many now - especially at the smaller end of the scale who haven't really modernised.
And what's all this about farmers complaining they are poor in the pub? Only ones I seem to speak to complain a lot more about the weather!
The real issue with farming is the supermarkets... if they gave a bit more of the profit margin to the producers then arguably we could cut subsidies all together but maybe that's another discussion. What's going on with the pig and egg producers right now is outrageous and completely solvable by the big buyers if they decide they want to.