Brief
Two farm programs paid more than half of 2025's money
American Factbook Research
Published
Data retrieved
The Farm Service Agency paid $24.4 billion in 2025 under 71 accounting programs. Two of them carried more than half of it.
It took 2 of 71 programs to pay half of 2025's money
The share of the year's farm program payments paid by the largest programs together, counting programs by accounting code from the largest down, net of repayments.
Source: The Farm Service Agency
About this chart
The figures
| Largest programs counted | Share of the money |
|---|---|
| 1 | 38.4% |
| 2 | 60.5% |
| 3 | 68.3% |
| 4 | 75.9% |
| 5 | 83.3% |
| 6 | 87.6% |
| 7 | 90.3% |
| 8 | 92.4% |
| 9 | 94.0% |
| 10 | 95.0% |
| 11 | 95.9% |
| 12 | 96.6% |
| 13 | 97.3% |
| 14 | 97.9% |
| 15 | 98.3% |
| 16 | 98.6% |
| 17 | 98.9% |
| 18 | 99.1% |
| 19 | 99.2% |
| 20 | 99.4% |
| 21 | 99.5% |
| 22 | 99.5% |
| 23 | 99.6% |
| 24 | 99.7% |
| 25 | 99.7% |
| 26 | 99.8% |
| 27 | 99.8% |
| 28 | 99.8% |
| 29 | 99.9% |
| 30 | 99.9% |
| 31 | 99.9% |
| 32 | 99.9% |
| 33 | 99.9% |
| 34 | 99.9% |
| 35 | 99.9% |
| 36 | 99.9% |
| 37 | 100.0% |
| 38 | 100.0% |
| 39 | 100.0% |
| 40 | 100.0% |
| 41 | 100.0% |
| 42 | 100.0% |
| 43 | 100.0% |
| 44 | 100.0% |
| 45 | 100.0% |
| 46 | 100.0% |
| 47 | 100.0% |
| 48 | 100.0% |
| 49 | 100.0% |
| 50 | 100.0% |
| 51 | 100.0% |
| 52 | 100.0% |
| 53 | 100.0% |
| 54 | 100.0% |
| 55 | 100.0% |
| 56 | 100.0% |
| 57 | 100.0% |
| 58 | 100.0% |
| 59 | 100.0% |
| 60 | 100.0% |
| 61 | 100.0% |
| 62 | 100.0% |
| 63 | 100.0% |
| 64 | 100.0% |
| 65 | 100.0% |
| 66 | 100.0% |
| 67 | 100.0% |
| 68 | 100.0% |
| 69 | 100.0% |
| 70 | 100.0% |
| 71 | 100.0% |
Embed this chart
Paste this where you want the chart. The picture carries its title, source and credit, under the site’s license.
The largest, the Emergency Commodity Assistance Program, paid $9.4 billion: 38.4% of the year. The second, the Supplemental Disaster Relief Non-Specialty Crops 1, paid 22.1%. The three largest together paid 68.3%. It took 2 programs to reach half of the year's money, and at the other end 31 programs paid under a million dollars each, 0.03% of the year between them.
The largest program by money was also the widest. At least 578,841 recipients were paid under it.
What a program is in this file
A program here is the accounting code USDA records against a payment, named by the description it publishes beside it. That description is an accounting label, abbreviated and in capitals as the file prints it, and this site expands the abbreviations only where the expansion can be checked against USDA's own words. The names above are those labels with the abbreviations expanded, by the same rule the program pages use.
The file does not say what a program is for. A name with "disaster" in it and a name without it are both accounting codes. Who qualifies, what triggers a payment and how large one can be are in statute and regulation, and none of that is in these rows. So this brief does not sort the programs into disaster, commodity or conservation. That would be a claim about the programs that the file cannot support, and a reader who wants it should read the program's own rules.
One code can carry several names. In 2025, 6 codes were published under more than one description. The dollars here are summed by code, and a code is named by the description that carries most of its money, so two spellings of one program are one program.
What the figures do not say
This is one calendar year, net of repayments, for one agency. A program that paid little in 2025 may pay a great deal in another year, and one that is large here may be new, or may be ending, and the year's file cannot say which. Crop insurance is administered separately and is in none of these files.
What this cannot show
- A program here is an accounting code USDA records against a payment, named by the description USDA publishes with it. What a program does, who qualifies and how much a recipient can receive are in statute and regulation, not in this file, and this brief does not sort programs into kinds.
- One code can carry several descriptions. Dollars are summed by code, and a code is named by the description carrying most of its money, as the program pages are.
- A recipient count for a code is a floor: the committed table counts recipients per description, and one recipient paid under two descriptions of a code cannot be added without counting them twice.
- One calendar year, net of repayments, one agency. Crop insurance is in none of these files.
Sources
- USDA Farm Service Agency — farm program payment files, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farm Service Agency. U.S. Government work. USDA's site-wide notice: "Most information presented on the USDA Web site is considered public domain information", with attribution requested as "U.S. Department of Agriculture". Retrieved September 24, 2026.
Every figure above is the recorded result of a query checked into the repository alongside this text. Continuous integration re-runs those queries and refuses the change if a number here and a number there disagree. Read the methodology, or the datasets behind it.
Published by American Factbook LLC. An independent publication.