Farming Park Avenue: Farm Subsidies from Manhattan to Montana

By Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel, 9-04-07

	Caption: Farm Subsidies in Manhattan. View a Map of United States Farm Subsidies here.

In early August, Mike Johanns, Secretary of Agriculture, spoke to Nashville farmers and ranchers about the 2007 Farm Bill, which regulates government expenditures for food and farm programs ranging from school lunch funding to farm subsidies. The bill is voted on every five years and is currently in the Senate where it will likely be reviewed in September.

After commiserating about the drought and insidious grasshoppers, Johanns discussed proposed changes to subsidies in the Farm Bill and how those will affect farmers and ranchers in this country. According to Johanns, the USDA proposed that if farmers make an annual adjusted gross income of $200,000 or more, producers would “graduate” from receiving the Title I cash subsidies. Even that stipulation would only affect 38,000 farmers. By comparison, he argued that the House version of the Farm Bill, passed in July, will only affect 7,000 people because it will not graduate farmers unless they make $1 million annually.

For Johanns this system is inequitable and to highlight the misuse of farm subsidies in the United States, the Secretary turned to a map of Manhattan, the New York City borough in the most densely populated county in the United States where land sells for $1,500 a square foot. Each red dot on the map represents a farm subsidy payment made under the 2002 farm bill with the largest circles representing quarter of a million dollar payments.

In response to the blotted map of subsidies Johanns said, “…there isn’t a person…that believes that’s what should be happening with our farm programs. And I’ll go even further. I believe America supports our farmers, but we have to make the case whether we’re in town or in the country that these programs make sense, that they are a wise federal policy and a good investment for food security and now fuel security.”

While the map may seem like an over-simplification of farm policy and subsidies it is a shocking statement about the state of agriculture. There is certainly agriculture in New York City, as detailed in the recent “food” issue of the New Yorker. But the community gardeners and beekeepers with apiaries over Brooklyn are practicing the locally based, sustainable kind of agriculture that remains unmapped and primarily unfunded by the Farm Bill.

Throughout the 2007 Farm Bill revisions, many nonprofits and organizations such as The Farm and Food Project proposed various policy amendments that would support localizing efforts such as implementation of CSA programs and funding for community food projects. However, most were not included in the 2007 Farm Bill.  (Full list of these amendments-opens pdf.)

Instead of implementing such innovations, legislators it seems must remain focused on fixing a broken subsidy system. According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a public interest research and advocacy group that maintains a database of farmers receiving subsidies, 66 percent of crop subsidies go to 10 percent of program participants.

Again New York state is a prime example as it received $1.11 billion in subsidies from 1995-2005. But 73 percent of all New York farmers and ranchers do not collect government subsidy payments. Instead, the bulk of the money went to just ten percent of the subsidy recipients, including over 1,300 businesses in New York City.

These businesses are primarily large, multinational corporations such as the Westvaco Corporation of 299 Park Avenue, which received some of the largest subsidies ($½ million) in New York City from 1995 to 2000.

In the case of Westvaco, now known as MeadWestvaco, subsidies are paid for land producing corn and barley in other states such as Kentucky and Mississippi, but the funds are directed to the multi-national corporate owner.

Information on subsidy recipients around the country is detailed in EWG’s updated online database. EWG gleaned information from millions of previously unpublished USDA subsidy records in order to provide, “nearly full disclosure of federal farm subsidy beneficiaries for the first time.” The records include information on individuals whose subsidy payments move from plantation-scale farm businesses to the corporations that actually receive the payments. In many cases, the names of individuals had not been connected to subsidy payments prior to this database. These include some 350,000 people who had not been identified as direct recipients of subsidies but who actually received almost a third of the $34 billion in crop subsidies between 2003 and 2005.

Through this disclosure, EWG now reports that farm program benefits are concentrated into a small bastion of large operations. One percent of the beneficiaries received seventeen percent of the crop subsidy benefit from 2003 to 2005. These benefits averaged around $125,000 dollars annually for each person. These subsidies are also concentrated geographically with only 19 of 435 congressional districts getting half of the crop subsidies paid from 2003-05.

While some Farm Bill reforms might change these inequitable subsidy systems, EWG believes that “…on balance, this House farm bill will be remembered as a missed opportunity for reform of federal farm policies that are broken at their core. It also represents a failure of House leadership to serve the broader needs of the nation; instead they took their cues at every turn from the farm subsidy lobby.”

With such large and controversial issues looming over the Farm Bill, it seems apparent that the Senate will continue to focus on these reforms rather than focus on ways to support the beekeepers tending hives above Brooklyn and small family farmers selling vegetables in Missoula, Salt Lake and around the country who are farming without such financial protections.