It's necessary to make the same division of "farmers" that was made by the people who would plan and bring into action the Easter Rising in Ireland. These people divided farmers into "ranchers" - those with hundreds of acres and thousands of cattle, the big pastoralists and giant horticulturists - and "small farmers" - people with an ordinary farm worked by the family with help shared with neighbours and sometimes hired-in work at harvest or planting time.
Newspaper and advertising people up to the 1990s used to divide readers and consumers of ads into groups comprising A, B, C, D, F1 and F2 - the very rich of A, the professionals of B, the middling Cs, poor Ds - and F1 being the wealthy landholders while F2 were the poor farmers struggling to make a living and put their family through school.
We'd be as well to realise that there's a similar division today; the MPs and TDs and Congress members swaggering into their parliaments in waxed Barbour coats and whipcords and gilets are one group, the people on their old tractors with red-chapped hands and faces drawn with exhaustion are another quite different group.
So looking at the effect of "taxes on farmers" - pshaw. This is just an attempt to divide society. Tax the rich. They're the ones with the money.
As for farm songs, a lot of songs are about farming people and the necessities of life, like the many songs about matchmaking, the economic necessity of life up to recently (and maybe even still).