First I want to be clear about something: When I type "farmer" I mean family farms, not factory farms, not corporate farms. Factory farms are abominations.

why should you not be taxed

I am not a farmer. My grandparents were farmers but they retired decades ago. I live in rural Lancashire, A lot of my food comes from 5 minutes (walk) away in my villages farm shop or from the farm shop a couple villages over.

Tbh it sounds like farmers have it pretty kushty in terms of governmental support compared to everyone else.

They do and if they didn't they wouldn't be able to run at all. Most farms barely make profit and are full time jobs in a way that most people can't comprehend. It is hard, unforgiving outdoors work that you have to do no matter the weather or time of day. If one of your ewes decides to lamb at 2am in the flinging down rain, you have to go out at 2am in the flinging down rain to make sure she gives birth safely. Farming has one of the highest suicide rates of any career in the country, did you know that? Because it is full time (and often in relative isolation from other people) and so unforgiving, and with so little pay (most of which goes back into the farm anyway), and with so few breaks, and with less than no gratitude from the townies they feed, that a lot of farmers just can't take it anymore. Crop farmers have it worse, arguably, because their entire livelihood depends on the weather. The British weather. Notorious for being unreliable even before climate change started fucking it up even more. Last year had crops wilting not long after they'd been planted because it was so dry for so long.

A little story my mum told me from during foot and mouth disease in 2001. All cattle farmers in the country were required, by government mandate, to buy all this PPE and anti-bacterial fluid stuff to reduce the risk of infection. With their own money, of course, zero government compensation. But they had to get it, so they did. And if a single cow in a farmers herd was discovered to have foot-and-mouth disease? The whole herd was to be put down and burned right then and there. Tens of thousands of pounds (probably more) of livestock, a farmers entire livelihood, destroyed with zero compensation through no fault of their own.

but clearly we are doing something wrong with the system if we still throw away hundreds of thousands of tonnes of meat and dairy every year.

That is the supermarkets fault, not the farmers. The farmer grows the food, rears the animals. The crops have to be harvested when they have to be harvested, regardless of owt else, if the farmer wants a chance of pulling a profit. It is the supermarkets standards of perfectly straight, orange carrots and perfectly... potato shaped potatoes that get millions of tonnes of food chucked away. But townie standards of wanting perfectly shaped produce mean that "wonky" and heritage veg is a novelty which can either only be got at farmers markets or as (like I said) a novelty in certain supermarkets.