Almost 10,000 Farmers Have Received Subsidies for 40 Straight Years

By Jared Hayes

For decades, the Department of Agriculture sent a total of over $10 billion in repeat payments to farmers, according to a new EWG analysis. Every year, for 40 years, the money went to nearly 10,000 farmers in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies or disaster relief.

Farmers may receive farm subsidies or disaster payments, even if they have collected a payment for each of those 40 years. Some members of Congress want to use the farm bill debate to increase these payouts for a select few farmers, while putting a ceiling on assistance for those who most need it – recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, also known as SNAP. More than half of all SNAP recipients leave the program after just a single year of assistance.

USDA data show a total of 9,526 recipients got farm subsidy payments every year between 1985 and 2024. The average amount collected annually, $28,000 per year over the 40-year period, totals $10.7 billion. The top 10 repeat farm subsidy recipients collected between $9 million and $19 million each during this period. 

Table 1. The 10 largest recipients of consecutive federal farm payments annually between 1985 to 2024.

Some subsidy recipients who received payments for 40 consecutive years neither work nor live on a farm, EWG found. In fact, 44 of the 9,526 repeat payment recipients live in some of the nation’s largest cities, despite a requirement that farm subsidy recipients be “actively engaged in farming.”

Between 1985 and 2024, farm subsidy programs paid farmers when crop prices fell below price guarantees set in the farm bill or when crop revenues fell below averages. Between 1996 and 2014, farmers also received “direct” subsidy payments linked to historic crop production. Disaster relief has been paid through annual spending bills and both temporary and permanent disaster programs.