I don't know about physically burning it but some land owners do get paid not to farm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy

This is a start.

Probably more likely to sit in warehousing and get wasted. If the government "burns" something, it would buy it and then not use it to control the supply. I don't know about that within the US, but I had a professor that gave an example where the US sells rice to Japan (that they don't really want) for whatever reason (bullied into a deal to help us increase exports, appearances, etc., basically a bunch of bullshit) and that the rice goes to waste in storage, but they have to export a certain quota to Japan that then doesn't get used in any capacity.

>>1017
The conservation reserve program, CRP. Conservation first, but it could be market manipulation, too.

Cheap foods probably are burned when overproduced. I.e. if the value of the food elsewhere is inferior to the cost to ship it there it may be cheaper to burn the stock, but only if it can't be sold as something else (e.g. animal feed). Storage is an option, but it isn't free either.

I gave Google Scholar ( http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=food+overproduction+burnt&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp= ) a shot and found this:
source: http://odin.agr.unideb.hu/AVA3/Beerkezett/Nagy%20Henrietta/AVA%202007%20K%C3%A1poszta%20angol.doc

>In the Czech Republic there is overproduction in wheat, therefore in more and more towns the surplus is burnt to produce heat. Heat is produced from renewable sources for public use in almost 70 Czech towns already, and wheat has also become such source recently because of the great surplus. In a small town called Zlutice, where the population is 3.000, hay is burnt in the local plant. The experiment started 3 years ago, in spite of the opposition of the population. There has been no smoke over the town since then. They abolished the contract with the power plant havin provided energy for the town until that time, and since then dozens of settlements have followed their example. There is a city, where 50% of the demand is fulfilled by the local biomass power plant, because they recognized that it is much cheaper than the traditional heating methods. Primarily not wheat is burnt in these power plants, it has become popular only because of the surpluses. The amount of wheat surplus is estimated at such an amount, which is sufficient for the heating of 400.000 households annually.

I suppose they do that elsewhere as well, but in France, they put some product on fishes that have been "over-fished" to make them improper to consumption and avoiding people having them for free in the garbage. Supermarkets do the same with the food they couldn't sell.

What a fucking waste.