Why does the tax payer give money gifts to wealthy land owners and landed gentry?

It turns out it was started to keep the price of food artificially high for the majority of people.

Legislation
"Farm subsidies began with the Agricultural Credits of 1923. The legislation was implemented to boost prices after World War I, when the overproduction during the war caused a surplus and price drop afterward."

Disadvantages

"The subsidies work as a price control by paying farmers to leave fields unplanted in times when the market is experiencing a surplus. Instead of using the excess crops to feed the needy, the farmers are not growing, yet being paid to do so. Farm subsidies also inhibit the normal market cycle."

www.ehow.co.uk/about_6725861_do-farmers-subsidies_.html

It is also employed as a method to keep imports in check. Otherwise, people simply wouldn't pay the over-inflated prices of produce grown in one country, over cheaper imports (at least they would be) from another.

By Margarit Kennedy:

userpage.fu-berlin.de/roehrigw/kennedy/english/chap3.htm

FARMERS

Because of the devastating effects of interest on our
agricultural system, farming provides a particularly good
case for a new money system. Agriculture is an industry
based on ecology. In general, ecological processes
follow a natural growth curve (Curve A in Figure 1)
Industrial processes must follow the exponential growth
curve of interest and compound interest, at present
(Curve C in Figure 1). Since nature cannot be made to
increase like capital, the industrialization of agriculture
has created threatening problems for our survival.
In the first phase of industrialization, farmers bought
bigger and better machinery. Then bigger farmers bought
up smaller farms to become even larger, with the help of
government subsidies and tax incentives. Then the signs
of sickness began to appear and multiply: the depletion
and pollution of water supplies; fertile soils becoming
like dried-out and compacted deserts; the loss of more
than 50% of all species; the overproduction of special
items which could only be sold with more government
subsidies; hybrid produce which is tasteless and
poisonous; total reliance on oil for transportation,
artificial fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides; vanishing
rain-forest to supply packaging materials for long hauls
between the places of production, storage, processing,
selling and consuming.
While interest is only one factor contributing to this
development, introduction of an interest-free money
system would be of particular importance for this
societal sector which secures our survival. Interest-free
loans, combined with land and tax reforms (see Chapter 2
), might allow a larger number of people than presently
expected to return to the land. Together with new
methods of sustainable agriculture, we may witness the
evolution of a different lifestyle, combining work and
leisure, hand and "brain" work, high and low technology,
to serve a more holistic approach to individual,
agricultural and social de
velopment.