Amendment fails that would have capped large farm subsidies

NORWICH – Last month, the U.S. Senate fell four votes short of approving an amendment that would have capped large federal subsidies to individual farms at $250,000 annually.

Senators Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) sponsored the amendment, meant to be included in the overdue 2007 Farm Bill, to limit million and multi-million payments that go each year to what some argue are already the nation’s wealthiest farms.

According to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics made available by the Environmental Working Group, a public policy organization, in the last 11 years, only 10 percent of the country’s farms – with the majority of the top-20 multi-million dollar recipients located the south – are receiving the bulk of federal money: $120.5 billion of the total $164.7 billion doled out between 1995 and 2005.

Under Dorgan-Grassley amendment, farms like Riceland Foods Inc. and Producers Rice Mill Inc., both in Arkansas – who combined received just under $30 million in 2005 – would only be allowed $250,000 each.

In Chenango County, the average farmer – mostly small, to medium-sized dairy operations – received just $5,211 in federal farm subsidies in 2005, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In the same year, the biggest payment to any one farm locally was $71,000.