Top 10 US Counties by USDA Government Payments
PlainFarmData ranks all 3,000+ US counties by total USDA government payments. The ranking reflects the most recent USDA NASS Census dataset.
Research period:
Research question
Among 3,000+ US counties, which receive the largest USDA government payment shares, and how does county-level payment concentration compare to county-level commodity sales?
Methodology
This ranking is generated fresh from the current dataset from the U.S. Department of Agriculture every time the page loads, not a fixed figure typed in once and forgotten. When a new release is published, our next data refresh picks it up automatically.
States or counties with no data reported are left out rather than shown as a false zero, since the U.S. Department of Agriculture occasionally withholds a figure for data-quality reasons.
Every number on this page traces back to a specific record from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, so you can verify it yourself against the original source. See our methodology page for the full data pipeline and how often we refresh.
Editorial governance: PlainFarmData maintains an editorial standards document that codifies how rankings are constructed, how outliers are surfaced, how privacy-protected records are handled, and how corrections are processed when an entity disputes a value attributed to it. Subject-submitted corrections route through a defined intake process and are reconciled against the upstream record before publication; cosmetic corrections are recorded as overlay metadata while substantive corrections wait for the next official source release. A named editor reviews every ranking page before publication and signs off using the byline displayed at the top of this page. Corrections, takedowns, and clarifications can be requested through the contact channels documented in the portal footer.
Transparency commitments: PlainFarmData publishes its full methodology, source registry, data-update status, and update history through dedicated pages reachable from the footer navigation. Visitors can trace any number on this page back to the underlying source row by following the entity link, inspecting the source URL referenced in the citation block, and comparing against the most recent vintage published by U.S. Department of Agriculture. Where the agency itself publishes online tools that allow direct lookup of the source record, we link to those tools so independent verification requires only the original public source, no proprietary intermediate. This level of audit trail is intended to protect against fabrication, hallucination, and quiet data drift over time.
See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.
Top 10 US Counties by USDA Government Payments
Live data, current as of the most recent source-data refresh
The ranked top 10
Every row below reflects the current dataset from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and updates automatically the next time we refresh it.
| # | County | State | Government payments | Commodity sales | Farms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fresno | California | $63.4B | $6996.0B | 4,427 |
| 2 | Polk | Minnesota | $51.0B | $697.4B | 1,223 |
| 3 | Stutsman | North Dakota | $44.8B | $419.7B | 829 |
| 4 | Brown | South Dakota | $42.0B | $520.7B | 1,073 |
| 5 | Tulare | California | $40.8B | $6356.4B | 3,713 |
| 6 | Gaines | Texas | $40.7B | $169.5B | 624 |
| 7 | Mclean | North Dakota | $36.6B | $345.5B | 742 |
| 8 | Cass | North Dakota | $34.3B | $612.7B | 801 |
| 9 | Marshall | Minnesota | $34.2B | $420.4B | 1,072 |
| 10 | Barnes | North Dakota | $34.1B | $323.0B | 739 |
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA NASS Census of Agriculture. Values are current as of our most recent data refresh. U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA NASS Census of Agriculture. Values are current as of our most recent data refresh.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is Fresno, with a value of $63.4B on the Government payments column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.
Distribution shape
The gap between the top-ranked record ($63.4B) and the 10th-ranked record ($34.1B) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from U.S. Department of Agriculture, specifically the USDA NASS Census of Agriculture. PlainFarmData ingests each new release and republishes the figures here automatically, so this page always reflects the current dataset rather than a fixed snapshot. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the transformation steps applied during ETL.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
County-level government payment totals aggregate all USDA program categories and do not reveal specific program composition. Payment concentration can reflect either many smaller payments to many farms or fewer large payments to large operations, the avg_farm_size column on each county distinguishes these patterns. County-level data reflects the location of the farming operation, not the residence of the recipient. Historical farm-bill program changes shift payment patterns across counties from year to year, making multi-year comparison important for establishing persistent vs transient concentration. Federal Crop Insurance premium-subsidies are excluded from county-level govt_payments totals and flow through the crop-insurance delivery system separately.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 counties by raw commodity sales, contrast with top by government payments
Sources
- USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Census of Agriculture - https://www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus/
- USDA Farm Service Agency, County Payment Records - https://www.fsa.usda.gov/
- USDA Economic Research Service, County-Level Farm Finance Estimates - https://www.ers.usda.gov/
Every figure on PlainFarmData is rendered directly from the USDA Census of Agriculture and farm-subsidy program data, no number is typed in by an editor. This page draws directly on USDA Farm Service Agency source data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.