How the farm subsidy figures are made

What a row is

One row is one disbursement by the Farm Service Agency under a farm program: a payee, a mailing address, an amount, a date, and the accounting program the money came from. It is not one recipient and it is not one year — a recipient can take several payments under one program on a single day, and two rows in the published file do exactly that.

A payment can be negative. FSA records a repayment or a correction as a negative disbursement, so every total on this site is net, and the hub page prints how many negatives the year holds beside the total.

A payee is not a farm

FSA pays the legal entity on its file. One operation held through three companies is three payees here, and none of them is “a farm”. Some payees are the agency itself: the Farm Service Agency, the Commodity Credit Corporation and county offices appear in the published record, and this site does not delete rows from the record it was given.

USDA publishes no identifier

FSA publishes a layout describing a customer number, and the files it publishes have no such column and no identifier of any kind. So this site decides what makes two rows the same recipient, and the decision is the narrowest one available: the name and the mailing address exactly as published, upper-cased and space-collapsed. No fuzzy matching, no grouping by name alone, no geocoding.

That costs something, and the pages say so rather than hiding it. A recipient who moved between years is two recipients. Two different people at one address with one name are one. A family operation paid through several entities is several. The hub page prints the count both ways — under the key and under name alone — so the size of the decision is visible rather than described.

A year is a year USDA chose

The files are published by calendar year, and what a year covers is the publisher’s choice rather than a constant. The 2007 file is almost all one program — 212,275 of its 212,296 rows are Milk Income Loss Contract payments, $74.8 million in all — while 2023 is 78 programs and $9.2 billion. So every figure here names its year, and nothing on this site sums two of them.

A payment made under one program year can be disbursed in a later calendar year, and the two are separate columns in the file. A figure on this site is the calendar year of the payment unless the page says otherwise.

The state is the one that paid

Each row carries FSA’s own state and county — the office that administered the payment — and, separately, the state on the payee’s mailing address. They can disagree, because a payee can be addressed to an accountant in another state. A state page here counts what that state’s county offices administered, which is what the record says and is not the same question as where any land is. FSA’s state and county numbering is its own, not the Census’s.

What is not here

This is the Farm Service Agency and nothing else. Crop insurance is administered by the Risk Management Agency and is published separately; conservation easements are the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s. A reader who wants “farm subsidies” in the widest sense will find one agency’s payments here, named as such on every page.

What this data cannot show

• A payee is not a farm. FSA pays the legal entity on its file, so one operation with three LLCs appears as three payees, and none of them is "a farm".
• The file carries no recipient identifier. USDA publishes a layout naming a customer number and the published downloads have no such column, so two rows are one payee here only where the name and the mailing address match exactly as published.
• The address is the mailing address FSA holds for payment, which need not be where any land is. A payee may be addressed to an accountant in another state.
• One row is one disbursement, and a payment can be negative where FSA records a repayment or a correction, so a total is net.
• This is the Farm Service Agency and nothing else. Crop insurance is administered by the Risk Management Agency and is not in these files.
• What a year of files covers is the publisher's choice and it changes. The 2007 file is almost all one program — 212,275 of its 212,296 rows are Milk Income Loss Contract payments — so it is not that year of farm support, and no figure here is a year total unless the page says which programs that year holds.
• Some payees are the agency. Farm Service Agency, the Commodity Credit Corporation and county offices appear as payees in the published file, and they are kept rather than deleted, because this site reports the record it was given.
• A payment under a program year can be disbursed in a later calendar year, so a figure is only a year’s figure once the page says which year it means.

Sources

• Farm program payment files — U.S. Department of Agriculture, Farm Service Agency · U.S. Government work, public domain, attribution requested · Updated: Annual