Combining the processing, mapping, analysis and memos, I worked on it for about five months.
The payment database includes a separate name table, which includes farm operator names and addresses. The tables are linked by a customer number, which is a surrogate for the tax ID that FSA normally uses. All of the different subsidy datasets can be linked using the customer number. The payment data also includes state codes, county codes, program names, types of crops, date and amount. It does not include the location of the farms, other than the county and state. I started cross-referencing the payment data with entity data, which identifies the members of each entity that collects subsidies. I found many recipients living quite a distance from the farms they are collecting on. People in Atlanta, New York City and even Saudi Arabia and Japan were collecting subsidies for U.S. farms.
It became apparent we needed to rework our definition of "farmer." We discovered that college students, churches, prisons, universities, corporate rate pension plans and even a sports bra company collect farm subsidies. Familiar names also popped up in the data, too including Chevron Corp., CNN founder Ted Turner and Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue.
Late last year after we published our project, FSA released a new data set of subsidy recipients, called 1614, that news organizations have not had until now. The dataset, named for Section 1614 of the 2002 Farm Bill, tracks all subsidy payments to a human being when possible. The new data is only 6 GB and contains 66 million records for payments from Oct. 2002 to June 2006.
Previously, some payment records stopped at the corporate level and did not disclose the owners cashing the subsidy checks. The 1614 data connects the dots for you. With the old data, I was able to uncover most of the owners behind corporations with a few extra queries.
For those organizations that don't have access to database management software like SQL Server, The Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group, posts subsidy data online. On its Web site, www.ewg.org, EWG illustrates aggregates and provides a searchable database to look up specific recipients and their entities.
After analyzing the payment records, we found: • Five percent of eligible farmers collect half of all U.S. farm subsidies. • Farmers can easily circumvent USDA limits on subsidy payments. Nearly 200 U.S. farm operations collected more than $1 million each in 2005. That's nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to a group that could fit inside a grade school cafeteria. • Subsidies drive up rural land prices and prevent small American growers from farming more land. • Wealthy Americans and institutions with no apparent need for government aid, including some who live far from their farmland, collect hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. Enforcement of income caps for subsidy recipients is spotty.
The data also turned up great leads on individual farmers. A top USDA official was the nation's single biggest beneficiary of a disaster relief program for orchard owners. Some farm operators accused of scheming to collect millions they were not entitled to later received millions more under new corporate names. Farmers who hit payment limits organized new partnerships to double or triple their subsidies.
The findings highlighted a fundamental flaw with current U.S. farm programs: They benefit landowners, sometimes to the detriment of farmers. That's because cropland owners can collect a subsidy even if they grow nothing, or they contract with a farmer to farm the land and split the subsidy.
We took it a step further and compared subsidy payments with those of another USDA program: food stamps. We found that a third of Georgia's counties collected more in farm subsidies than food stamps.
Agricultural Census data provided an astonishing glimpse at the decline in farms and farmers in Georgia. Compiled by the National Agricultural Statistics Service, the ag census provides state and county-level numbers on everything regarding agriculture and is conducted every five years. NASS will survey farmers in December of this year; the data should be available in February 2009.