In neighboring Chevy Chase, Md., one of the nation's wealthiest communities, lawyers, lobbyists and at least one psychologist collected nearly $342,000 in taxpayer farm subsidies between 2008 and 2011, according to the watchdog group Open the Books.
Taxpayer subsidies were also paid out to Gerald Cassidy, the founder of one of Washington's most powerful lobbying firms, Cassidy & Associates; Charlie Stenholm, a former congressman; and Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack continues to receive subsides even though he has overseen the agency that pays them since 2009.
"All of it is entirely legal," said Adam Andrzejewski, founder of Open the Books, a group that created an online database and mobile app to track the subsidies.
The Department of Agriculture awarded nearly $178 billion in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2012, and another $39 billion in conservation subsidies, according to a second watchdog group, the Environmental Working Group.
Taxpayer subsidies to U.S. farmers predate the Great Depression, but the program has seen few reforms over the years and is now "out of control," Andrzejewski said. Billions once spent to keep family farms from going under now go mainly to agribusiness giants, like Monsanto and ADM, and to wealthy landowners who have never farmed.
To illustrate just how far the subsidy program has strayed from its original purpose, Open the Books calculated payments going to three major cities with few, if any, modern ties to farming: Washington, D.C., New York City and Chicago. Taxpayers sent $30 million to those residents over the past four years to compensate them for converting farmland to conservation areas and for growing soybeans, cotton, corn, rice and other crops.
The big-city farm subsidies show that savvy landowners are legally maximizing a return on their real estate investments at the expense of taxpayers, Andrzejewski said. They buy land, hire a farm manager and collect a check from the federal government, he said.
Open the Books found that subsidies flow into both working-class city neighborhoods and tony suburban neighborhoods, though poorer residents got far less taxpayer money than the wealthy and connected.
In the Fairlawn neighborhood in Southeast Washington, where the annual average income is about $20,000 -- compared to $106,000 in Chevy Chase -- residents collected a total of $10,000 in subsidies between 2008 and 2011, according to Open the Books.
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