Farm subsidies should go only to people living or working on a farm.
That’s what Senate Agriculture Committee members Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) agreed on when the panel debated the farm bill earlier this month. Grassley, a long-time advocate for ensuring farm subsidy recipients are “actively engaged” on a farm, and Welch both said subsidies for people living in the country’s largest cities makes little sense.
EWG has long held the same position.
For years we’ve tracked the billions of dollars paid out in farm subsidies to people who don’t live or work on farms. We recently found that more than 92,000 “city slickers” living in some of the biggest metropolitan areas in the U.S. took in more than $2.6 billion in farm subsidies between 2020 and 2025.
Although it seems no one believes paying these city slickers makes sense, Republicans at the recent Senate farm bill hearing voted against doing anything about it.
‘Actively engaged’
Welch proposed a series of amendments to the pending farm bill that would ensure that people who collect subsidies live or work on a farm. They would also lower payment limits on those subsidies and address fraud in two of the largest farm subsidy programs.
If adopted and enacted, these changes would help taxpayers and family farmers.
One of his amendments would have simply required an audit of some farm subsidy recipients when a subsidy program has a high “error rate,” which indicates farmers may have been paid too much.
Welch suggested subsidies should go to people “on tractors” and offered the amendment to audit certain farms.
Grassley agreed, saying, “You and I believe that people who are actively engaged are the only ones who should be receiving farm payments.”
Grassley also said runaway farm subsidies are driving up the cost of farming, making it harder for family farmers to compete with their larger, more heavily subsidized neighbors. “We should be helping those farmers who can’t help themselves,” not the biggest corporate farms collecting the lion’s share of farm subsidies, he said.
When Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, in 2025, lawmakers enlarged loopholes that make it easier for the largest farm operations to get more money.
The bill allowed every member of a farm partnership to collect up to $155,000, so long as the farm is organized as a pass-through entity, such as a joint venture, S corporation, or limited liability corporation.
Since the new law was enacted, the number of “city slickers” collecting farm subsidies has increased by 13,000 – even if some of those recipients never step foot on a farm.
One of Welch’s amendments would have only required an audit when the “error rate” for two farm subsidy programs exceeded 6%. Agriculture Department studies show that the error rate for the two programs topped 6% in 2022 and 8% in 2023, resulting in more than $567 million in improper payments.
Republicans have insisted that states should share more of the cost of anti-hunger programs when the error rate exceeds 6 percent, so simply requiring an audit when farm subsidy program error rates exceed 6 percent seems reasonable, right?
Wrong.
Grassley and other committee Republicans voted against Welch’s audit amendment. Democrats refuse to support the GOP farm bill in part because it fails to address deep funding cuts to anti-hunger programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP.
So Grassley said he would not be able to support any amendments Democrats offer.
Dairy farm subsidies
Even Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman (R-Ark.) seemed to agree that farmers – or at least Welch’s dairy farmers – should have to live or work on farms if they receive farm subsidies.
Unlike other farm subsidy programs – which can make a payment regardless of whether the “farmer” actually harvests a crop – dairy subsidies are automatically terminated if a dairy receiving them stops producing milk.
Welch said that the principle – of subsidies going only to people who truly live and work on farms – should apply to all farmers, no matter what they produce.
He said, “Whether it’s the SNAP program or it’s a [farm] support program, the intention of Congress is that the actual farmer that gets the money or the actual person who is in need of nutrition gets the nutrition aid.”
