For 41 years in a row, USDA sent taxpayer-funded payouts to roughly 9,000 farmers, totaling $10.6B

For more than four decades, almost 9,000 farmers have received taxpayer money every year through Agriculture Department payments totaling about $10.6 billion, a new EWG analysis finds.

These massive payouts – farm subsidies and disaster relief between 1985 to 2025 – went in many cases to large and successful farm operations. At the same time, a sizable number of small and specialty crop farms continue to struggle with increasing costs, industry consolidation pressures and soaring bankruptcies.

Farmers can keep getting farm subsidies or disaster payments, even if they have collected a payment for each of the 41 years that EWG reviewed – with some receiving millions of dollars annually.

President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, pushed through last year by Republicans in Congress, changed policy to increase these payouts for a select few farmers. 

The law also capped assistance for those who most need it, such as recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program food benefits, also known as SNAP. More than half of all SNAP participants leave the program after just a single year of assistance.

USDA data show a total of 8,839 recipients collected farm subsidy payments every year between 1985 and 2025, EWG found. The average amount collected annually, $29,000 per year over the 41-year period.

The top 10 repeat farm subsidy recipients collected between $9 million and $22 million each during this period (see Table 1). 

Table 1. The 10 largest recipients of consecutive federal farm payments annually between 1985 to 2025

Some subsidy recipients who received payments for 41 consecutive years neither work nor live on a farm, EWG also found. In fact, 38 of the 8,839 repeat payment recipients live in some of the nation’s largest cities, despite the USDA requirement that farm subsidy recipients be “actively engaged in farming.”

Between 1985 and 2025, 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. 

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office examined improper payments made to the agriculture industry. The report found that a tariff relief program started under the first Trump administration had an improper payment rate of 19.3%. The GAO also found that a USDA disaster program had an error rate of 45.2%.

EWG did not obtain data on subsidies distributed before 1985. Farmers are also eligible for crop insurance premium subsidies, but federal law prevents the USDA from disclosing information about the recipients of individual crop insurance subsidies.

Increasing dependency on farm subsidies

Trump’s OBBBA was filled with farm subsidy loopholes and other provisions that will increase farmers’ dependence on federal support. These conditions mean the vast majority of payments are going to the largest, most successful farms. At the same time, they drive up costs for farms, including small farms, which are facing increased likelihood of bankruptcy.

When the largest operations capture most of the money, they can outbid their neighbors for land, inflating rents and land prices for the smaller and beginning farmers, who are already closest to the financial edge.

Only 40% of farms grow crops eligible for payments linked to government-set price guarantees, known as reference prices, and the top 10% of those farmers collected nearly three-quarter of all payments. 

But Trump’s law increased the prices guaranteed to those farmers by 10% to 20%. As a result, more farmers – not fewer – will become permanently dependent on subsidies. 

The law increased price guarantees so much that most cotton, rice and peanut farmers are all but guaranteed to receive a payment every year.

And the law hiked payment limits, from $125,000 to $155,000 per person, while allowing every member of a farm organized as a joint venture, S corporation or limited liability corporation to collect up to $155,000 a year. 

The OBBBA also let farmers who grow “covered commodities” like peanuts, rice and cotton to collectively add 30 million additional acres of farmland to qualify for farm subsidy payments. That’s an 11% increase in the number of eligible acres.

New bailouts will repeat the pattern

The Senate is considering a Farm Bill 2.0 this month but it doesn’t contain much-needed changes to subsidy programs. 

Instead, the emergency bailouts stacked on top of the OBBBA are following the same script as previous payouts.

In March last year, the Trump administration began issuing $10 billion in “one time” economic relief for farmers. These congressionally authorized payments were available only for covered commodities such as corn, soybeans, cotton and rice. Fruit, vegetable, dairy and livestock producers were largely shut out.

In December, the Trump administration announced another $12 billion “one time” so-called bridge payment, with $11 billion again flowing to farmers of covered commodities only. If the trend from the past three farm bailouts continues, most of the funding will go once again to some of the largest and most successful operations.

This June, the White House asked Congress for an additional $11 billion in farm aid, this time bundled inside an $87.6 billion supplemental request to pay for the war with Iran. Much of the distress these payments are intended to address traces back to the administration’s own trade wars and the war with Iran. Those actions are driving farmers’ fertilizer, fuel and other input costs even higher.

As EWG’s analysis underscores, each round of farm aid has flowed the same way as the subsidies before it: The biggest operations take the largest share year after year, while struggling small and mid-size farms closest to bankruptcy see the least.