And we find this surprising because...?

This Fox News article clearly lays out the findings of a recent report that stated that millions of dollars in farm subsidies went to farmers who are multi-millionaires and should not have received subsidies. Now, I am a free trade proponent, so I'll tend to come down on the side opposing subsidies of any kind, but I've read about these abuses from multiple authors over the last several years, so I'm not really sure why anyone finds this information new, surprising or even noteworthy. It wasn't noteworthy for the last several years, so why now? Oh, maybe because our new incoming President, Obama, seems to have taken notice, declaring this as an example of wasteful government spending that he is going to "fix". Okay, I'm with him on that, although I'd prefer he fix it by doing away with the subsidies entirely. Why? Well, for starters, almost all the recipients of these funds are multi-millionaire operations. While the farms specified in the report are clear violators, the actual requirements for farm subsidies are that a farmer gets 75 percent of his/her income from farming and that they make less than 2.5 million dollars. I don't know about you, but last time I checked, 2.5 million qualified as millionaire. The next part of this is that our government, in their infinite wisdom choose to pay people not to farm. Yes, that's correct, they pay out millions every year to farmers not to farm their land. This is supposedly some sort of conservation measure. However, it seems to me that if a farmer needs to let his land lay fallow for a period of time, that's okay, but this isn't what is happening in reality. These lands don't need to be fallow, yet the government pays out money for them to be anyway. I really don't understand this concept at all. Perhaps someone could explain it to me?