Delaware and Maine, compared

How to read this

• This is where the payment was administered, not where the money went. FSA pays through a county office, and a recipient addressed elsewhere is counted at the office that paid them. Neither column is a measure of farming in the place it names.
• A recipient is a name and a mailing address. USDA publishes no identifier, so an operation paid through three companies is three recipients here and a payee who moved during the year is two. The recipient counts on the two sides are comparable with each other and are not counts of farms.
• Larger is not worse, and neither is smaller. The figures are what one agency disbursed under the programs it runs. They are not a subsidy per acre, not the whole of federal farm support, and not a finding about anybody.
• Nothing here is divided by a population. Farm payments go to farms rather than to residents, so a per-resident figure at state level would be arithmetically correct and about something else. The county pages carry one because it is the only way to compare counties, and they say the same thing there.