The Daily Skunk

If interested in the farm subsidy database, see http://www.ewg.org:16080/farm/ 

The following is an excerpt from http://www.ewg.org:16080/farm/whatstheplan.php 

As we near the end of the costliest decade in the 70-year history of government farm subsidies, a new update to the Environmental Working Group’s farm subsidy database finds that taxpayers have spent more than $131 billion on federal farm programs over the past nine years. The total includes $16.4 billion spent during 2003, the fourth highest amount over the nine years and a 27 percent increase over 2002. Surges in disaster payments and commodity subsidies drove the increase, along with a modest expansion in conservation spending (see U.S. subsidy summary).
To put this expenditure in perspective, for the money taxpayers have provided in commodity and disaster subsidies alone over this period (88 percent of the total), not counting $16 billion in conservation payments, we could have bought 25 percent or more of all the farms in 302 counties–land, barns, farmhouses and all. In 47 counties where agriculture exists almost purely by the grace of government, taxpayers could have bought outright half the farms or more for the money we’ve spent in just the past nine years.
It’s not as if the subsidies are ’saving the family farm.’ Of the 2,128,982 farms enumerated by the most recent Census of Agriculture, for 2002, only 33 percent received government payments. Two-thirds of the nation’s farmers get no subsidy payments whatsoever. For the most part they don’t qualify because they grow the ‘wrong’ things. If you want to see what the wrong things are, stroll through the produce aisle or meat department of your local supermarket. The farmers who produce most of America’s food do so without a check from taxpayers.
As the Farm Subsidy Database has documented in the past, the vast majority of the farmers who do receive government subsidy checks get minimal amounts of money. Eighty percent of the recipients between 1995 and 2003 received, on average, $6,918 for the entire period (see table on payment concentration). That comes to $768 a year, just over sixty-five bucks a month. Not much to run a family farm on—though in aggregate, the 2.4 million recipients in this category ended up taking almost $17 billion from taxpayers over 9 years.
Corn subsidies are a good example of the farm subsidy pyramid. In area, corn is the most important crop grown in this country–some 78 million acres have been planted in recent years–and no USDA subsidy program sends taxpayer money to more recipients. Between 1995 and 2003, government records show, 1,438,423 individual farmers, partnerships, corporations, estates and other entities received at least one corn subsidy payment. Yet 80 percent of them collected, on average, just over $4,700 total over the 9 years (see EWG’s payment concentration analysis for corn). That’s about $529 per year. No American family farm–no business, for that matter–is materially assisted by payments of less than $50 a month. Yet because there are 1.15 million subsidy beneficiaries in this category (the bottom-most 20 percent of recipients), taxpayers paid them $5.5 billion, about 15 percent of total corn subsidies.
The real action is at the top of the farm subsidy food chain, where 10 percent of the recipients—just over 305,023 individuals, partnerships, corporations, estates and myriad other entities—took in 72 percent of the total payments taxpayers provided for conservation, commodity and disaster programs over the 9 years. (That’s an upward tick of 1 percent in concentration for the top 10 percent over the eight-year analysis EWG presented last year.) They collected, on average, $309,823 each, roughly $34,000 annually. The elite in this world of government dependency collected even more. The top four percent of recipients, for instance, number just over 122,000. Yet they cost taxpayers about $65 billion over 9 years, which works out to an average of $529,000, or nearly $59,000 per year.
What makes that particular number memorable is that it is almost exactly what the average American household earned in 2003. The average farm household is a different matter. They made significantly more, nearly $10,000 more (16 percent), averaging $68,605. To compound the irony of subsidies as family farm safety net, almost all of the income for the average farm household, 89 percent, came from off-farm sources, the jobs in town or elsewhere that make farm living pencil out for most Americans. It’s not just that government subsidies aren’t saving the family farm. Not even farming is.
The two categories of subsidies that ostensibly are available to all farmers, even if they grow the ‘wrong’ things, are conservation programs and disaster aid. While both categories increased in 2003 compared to 2002—disaster aid most strikingly—a different set of inequities plague these forms of assistance (go here for a subsidy summary by year and category).
The public hears a lot of soothing, bi-partisan talk about the vital importance of conservation and protecting the environment whenever it’s time to move an ungainly farm subsidy bill through the body politic. But once the flow of commodity payments has been locked in, Congress proceeds in the out years to cut funds from the very conservation programs that provide broader, public interest cover when subsidy bills are under fire. As a consequence, far more farmers perennially apply for conservation programs than existing funds can serve. This “conservation backlog,” recently documented by Environmental Defense, is of course made worse when Congress, with the tacit approval of the subsidy lobby, cuts conservation spending instead of commodity programs. In the current fiscal year, for instance, Congress slashed conservation program funds by nearly a half-billion dollars in the omnibus spending measure. Congress also cut $1.9 billion from conservation accounts earlier this fall in order to pay for farm disaster aid.
Disaster Prone. In the case of disaster aid, the inequity arises not from providing too little support to too few farmers, but from providing most of the support to the same farmers year after year.
A farm-by-farm review of $11.3 billion in federal disaster payments over a nine-year period (1995 through 2003) finds that annual emergency measures like the one approved by Congress this fall, have funneled checks from taxpayers to hundreds of thousands of farms on a regular basis. Indeed, it appears that tens of thousands of ‘disaster-prone’ crop and livestock operations, most of them in the arid Great Plains, have become highly dependent on disaster payments. And the more disaster-prone and dependent farmers and ranchers not only received the bulk of the taxpayer aid, they have also averaged the highest disaster payments per year.
The disaster payments, largely to compensate for crop shortfalls, came on top of a record stream of nearly $104 billion in subsidies paid to crop farmers because they produced too much.
For most farms, disaster aid is an occasional, but vital form of government assistance, and one that taxpayers might well consider a fair and important investment in the nation’s family farmers and ranchers. Computer records obtained from USDA under the Freedom of Information Act, and maintained in EWG’s Farm Subsidy Database, show that taxpayers provided farm disaster payments to 1,160,705 individuals, partnerships, corporations and other recipients over the nine years. About half of the recipients (578,198 farm entities) collected aid just one year in the period studied. Moreover, they accounted for only 14 percent of the total disaster money provided by taxpayers ($1.6 billion) and received a modest $2,771 on average. Another 22 percent of recipients were provided aid two years out of nine. They collected 16 percent of farm disaster assistance, about $1.85 billion, averaging $3,663 apiece.
But as disaster aid dependency increases—measured by the number of years out of nine that a farmer or rancher received taxpayer help—USDA data reveal a segment of farm operations chronically dependent on disaster aid collecting the majority of federal assistance.
EWG’s analysis finds that over 28 percent of the recipients — 329,604 individuals, partnerships, corporations or other entities–collected disaster aid from taxpayers at least one year out of three, accounting for 70 percent of total farm disaster aid over the period—some $7.86 billion.
Over 15 percent of the recipients (176,379 farm entities) collected disaster aid at least four years out of nine (44 percent of the time). This group, which we consider chronically dependent on disaster aid, took in just over half of the farm disaster payments provided over the period, $5.7 billion.
About 30 percent of the taxpayer assistance ($3.36 billion) went to an even more dependent group of 76,287 recipients (7 percent of the total for the period) that collected disaster checks every other year (five years out of 9, or 55.5 percent of the time).
At the extreme end of the disaster-dependency spectrum are about 26,000 truly disaster-prone recipients who received disaster money at least six years out of nine; this seven percent of all recipients took in 13 percent of the disaster aid, about $935 million. Among that group are 8,384 who claimed disaster aid for seven years out of nine, 1,686 who got disaster payments eight years out of nine, and 27 recipients who got a disaster check from taxpayers every year for nine straight years.
EWG also found that the more often a subsidy recipient collected disaster aid, the higher their average disaster payments tended to be. The fifty percent of farm operations that received disaster aid just one year out of nine collected just $2,771. But those who got payments for three years collected $4,677 per year, and the 100,092 disaster subsidy recipients who got payments four years out of nine averaged $5,836 annually. Chronically disaster-prone operations that collected aid checks more than half the time routinely received payments averaging $8,000 or more per year.
Disaster payments are concentrated in states with persistent drought conditions where crop failures are relatively common. One third of all disaster payments over the nine years analyzed went to farmers in six states: Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, and South Dakota.
Payments to farmers chronically dependent on disaster payments are concentrated in even fewer states. More than half the farmers who received disaster aid four or more of the nine years analyzed — our definition of chronically dependent — are from just five states: Texas, Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, and Georgia.