Almost 80,000 “city slickers” living in some of the biggest metro areas in the U.S. took in more than $2 billion in farm subsidies between 2020 and 2024. Many recipients used loopholes that allow the money to be sent to people who don’t live or work on farms.
And House Republicans are proposing a budget bill that would enlarge these loopholes even further. If enacted, their bill would make the problem worse by sending even more taxpayer funds to recipients living in cities, not on farms.
The high levels of Department of Agriculture farm subsidy recipients in these metropolitan areas are mostly due to loopholes in the last farm bill, along with payouts from two disaster programs in the first Trump administration.
Farm subsidy recipients must be “actively engaged” in farming. But it’s very easy to qualify as actively engaged. The law’s loopholes allow urban residents to get farm subsidies, even if they do not live or work on a farm. The Government Accountability Office in 2018 found that roughly one-fourth of farm subsidy recipients do not contribute any personal labor to farms.
EWG analyzed USDA data to find that between 2020 and 2024, $2 billion in farm subsidies went to 79,458 recipients living in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and 197 other major metro areas.
Payments to metro area recipients averaged almost $30,000 per recipient between 2020 and 2024, or nearly $6,000 each per year.
Rather than close loopholes that let city slickers collect farm subsidies, the 2018 Farm Bill created more of them. That law allowed a farmer’s cousins, nieces and nephews, and all members of “general partnerships” to receive payments, whether they live or work on a farm or not.
The House budget bill could make it even easier for city slickers to collect payments. It would do this by changing the structure of the payment limit for corporate farms and increasing the payment limit for all farms.
In particular, the bill would allow every individual member of a farm organized as a joint venture or limited liability company to take in $155,000 every year. Subsidies to corporate farms would be limited only by the number of people in the LLC.
Currently, each member of a farm takes in a proportional share of $125,000. If a farm LLC has five members, they split $125,000 five ways. But under the budget bill, each member would qualify for an amount as high as $155,000. This change would increase the number of city slickers who get farm subsidies.
Locating city slickers
EWG’s analysis identified city slickers living in ZIP codes in the 200 most populous metro areas. Using existing datasets, we identified subsidy recipients as those living in areas with a population density greater than 3,000 people per square mile.
To rule out non-urban areas, the methodology looked at places the USDA doesn’t consider rural that are within a certain proximity of a city center, as well as additional metrics.
This analysis updates and builds on previous EWG estimates of city slickers, which included only recipients who lived within city limits. The updated methodology seeks to capture urban sprawl, which has changed how certain areas are defined, and to foster a better understanding of how many subsidy recipients live in urban areas.
Here’s the list of the 200 biggest metro areas, along with the number of urban recipients and the amount of total farm subsidies people in that metro area received between 2020 and 2024.
