What actually moves US farm payments

Key findings

Each finding is computed from the archive when this page is served, so it stays current after every data update. Quote any of them with attribution to PlainFarmData and the underlying USDA source.

• Disaster and emergency farm aid is 4.7 times as volatile as conservation spending: across the 30 finalized USDA ERS fiscal years (FY1995-FY2024) it varies by 137.5% against conservation's 29.5%.
• US disaster and emergency farm payments ranged from $275M in FY2006 to $31.4B in FY2020, a 115-fold swing within a single federal programme channel.
• USDA conservation payments stayed between $1.5B (FY1998) and $4.3B (FY2024) across 30 years, a 2.9-fold range against the 115-fold range in disaster and emergency aid over the same series.
• Total US government payments to farms averaged $15.2B a year over FY1995-FY2024, with a year-to-year variation of 50.2%.
• For the median US county, federal farm program payments equal 1.68% of that county's own commodity sales, based on the 2,939 counties where the USDA NASS 2022 Census of Agriculture publishes both figures.
• Federal farm dependence varies roughly 26-fold between US counties: the 90th-percentile county draws 8.51% of its commodity sales from federal payments against 0.33% at the 10th percentile.
• Only 16 of 50 US states received more than the $245M average state total in the USDA ERS state snapshot for fiscal year 2023.
• The ten largest recipient states account for 55.9% of the $12.3B distributed across all 50 states in the USDA ERS state snapshot.

Which channel drives the swings?

Total federal farm program payments are often described as unpredictable. Splitting the series into its channels shows the unpredictability is not spread evenly across them. Conservation programs pay out on multi-year contracts and enrolled acreage, so their annual total stays inside a narrow band. Disaster and emergency programs respond to weather, price shocks and one-off legislation, so they do not.

Over these 30 years disaster and emergency aid ranged from $275M to $31.4B, against a conservation range of $1.5B to $4.3B. A single year of disaster aid can therefore exceed the entire conservation programme several times over, or fall to a small fraction of it. For anyone reading a one-year change in the headline total, that is the channel to check first.

How far does federal dependence spread between counties?

Expressing each county's federal farm program payments as a share of its own commodity sales gives a like-for-like measure of how much of local farm revenue is federal rather than market. Across the 2,939 counties where both figures are published, the median county sits at 1.68%, but the distribution has a long tail.

10th percentile

0.33%

Median county

1.68%

90th percentile

8.51%

A county at the 90th percentile draws roughly 26 times the federal share of a county at the 10th. Dependence is therefore not a national condition but a local one, and a national average describes almost no individual county well. Per-county figures are on each county page.

NASS withholds commodity sales for 23 counties with too few farm operations to publish without identifying individual producers. Those counties are excluded from this distribution rather than counted as zero sales.

How concentrated are payments across states?

In the ERS state snapshot for fiscal year 2023, the 90th-percentile state received 3.9 times the median state's payments, and only 16 of 50 states cleared the $245M average. Payment totals follow the geography of large-acreage commodity production, not population, which is why a per-state ranking and a per-capita one would tell different stories. The full ranking is on the states page.

Method

• Payment channel figures come from the USDA ERS Farm Income and Wealth Statistics national series, restricted to fiscal years through 2024. Later ERS years are preliminary forecasts and are excluded from every distribution on this page.
• Variation is the coefficient of variation: the standard deviation of the annual series divided by its mean, shown as a percentage. It is unitless, so channels of different size are directly comparable.
• County dependence is a county's federal farm program payments divided by its own commodity sales, both from the USDA NASS 2022 Census of Agriculture. Counties with suppressed or zero sales are excluded, never treated as zero.
• ERS state and national payment totals and NASS county tables are separate populations and are never added together. See our methodology.