Farm & Food File: How one Texas county grabbed almost $1 billion in farm subsidies in 10 years

You’d think that the three extra years Congress has taken to update the 2018 farm bill might mean it stumbled upon solutions to today’s falling farm income, sagging ag exports, the need for more federal bailouts and the White House’s bubble-gum-and-baling-wire trade policy.

Well, stop thinking; Congress did years ago. That’s not a slander, it’s a fact and Jonathan Coppess, an associate professor and the director of the Gardner Agriculture Policy Program at the University of Illinois, can prove it.

In an information-packed report published April 23 by farmdocDAILY, Coppess dives into an enormous farm payment database to put a “magnifying lens” on just where federal farm dollars went from 2014 to 2023.

His research shows federal farm dollars poured into every rural crack, cranny and community: “Out of a total 3,154 total counties in the dataset,” he writes, “3,047 (97%) have received at least some payments from 2014 to 2023.”

Most of the money arrived courtesy of farm bill-supported programs like Agriculture Risk Coverage, Price Loss Coverage and crop insurance.

All address falling farm revenue, income, or crop yields. Billions more flowed from conservation, dairy and ad-hoc disaster programs.

It’s standard farm bill fare until you look more closely. For example, in a deeper data dive, Coppess found that 18 of the top 25 counties receiving only ARC and PLC payments — the federal government’s two key farm programs — were in the South.

Moreover, the nation’s top farm payment county over that decade was Gaines County in West Texas, which pulled in a staggering $169.6 million in “estimated total payments.”

The second biggest pile went to Cavalier County in upper-northeastern North Dakota, which raked in $165.1 million under the ARC and PLC programs.

Why were no Corn Belt counties in his Top 25?

Simple, southern farmers “can plant other crops on the base acres” especially corn and soybeans, Coppess explains, that add “payments from the (ARC and PLC) programs to the revenue of the crop planted.”

In short, the cotton growers take their generous program payments and skip planting cotton to, instead, plant corn and soybeans.

And then, to rub salt into any Midwesterner’s chapped backside, these West Texas farmers also enroll in federally-subsidized crop insurance in case they have trouble making a corn or soybean crop in cotton country.

And, boy, do they.

Here’s how Coppess explains it: “Gaines County, Texas provides a case study. The county was the largest recipient of total ARC and PLC payments ($169.6 million) … It was also the largest recipient of net farmer benefits from crop crop insurance for 2014 to 2024 ($795 million).”

So, between ARC, PLC and crop insurance, “Gaines County has received nearly $1 billion in taxpayer funded benefits for farmers ... (and) if the payee counts are accurate … those total benefits went to fewer than 600 farmers."

He’s right; Gaines County farmers shared $965 million in federal farm program and crop insurance benefits in 10 years for an average benefit of $1.6 million apiece. And it was all legal, every single taxpayer penny.

They weren’t alone; 13 other counties — 12 of them in the South — welcomed a collective $1.5 billion in federal PLC farm payments over the same decade.

And it’s about to get worse.

Last July’s massive reconciliation bill passed by the GOP-led Congress generously added another $60 billion in ARC and PLC funding over the next 10 years.

Additionally, these budget pigeons expanded “base acres” — acres entitled to federal farm benefits — by a whopping 30 million to all but ensure the additional $60 billion will be gobbled up.

Little wonder the Republicans insist on calling the reconciliation bill the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In cotton, rice and peanut country, it’s simply gorgeous.