I would agree with you Borodog. But I think a portion of the subsidies actually go towards paying farmers to not put any crops on their land (this might have been his point of the subsidies not causing overproduction) because there are already enough of those crops. It's basically just a huge amount of money given to farmers for any reason they can come up with, there are subsidies for those growing crops, subsidies for people not to grow crops to keep prices artifically high, subsidies for taking farmland out of production in the name of conservation, etc... It seems completely ridiculous.
Here's a good article on the subject.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1680139-1,00.html