The House and Senate budget reconciliation bills are packed with loopholes that will send tens of billions more dollars in subsidies to the largest farms. But most farmers in Minnesota would not benefit much, if at all, from these proposed changes.
The bills include proposals that would raise total national spending on farm subsidies by:
- Increasing crop price guarantees by 10% to 20%
- Making 30 million additional acres of farmland eligible for subsidy payments
- Raising payment limits from $125,000 to $155,000 per person
- Allowing every member of a farm organized as a pass-through entity, including corporate farms, to collect an amount up to the new payment limit.
But most farmers in Minnesota don’t get money from commodity farm subsidy programs – and this wouldn’t change much under the budget bills.
According to the Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture, Minnesota is home to over 65,000 farms. And yet in 2024, only 4,662 received funding from federal commodity subsidy programs.
The House has passed its version of the bill, and the Senate is considering its version.
How size matters
Farm subsidy programs are set up so that the more acres a farmer owns or operates, the more they get in payments. So most of the money from these programs goes to the largest and wealthiest farmers.
In Minnesota, the average farm size is only 388 acres – smaller than the average U.S. farm size, which is 463 acres. Minnesota’s small farms stand to gain little or nothing from the farm subsidy provisions in the bills.
Of the Minnesota farmers who do get farm subsidies, only a small percentage of wealthy farmers receive large payments. In 2024, the top 10% of farm subsidy recipients collected 55% of commodity payments. These 466 recipients got $10,640,779 in total, with an average payment of $22,834 that year.
The payments are even more concentrated in the top 1% of farm subsidy recipients. Just 46 recipients collected 17% of payments in 2024, and together collected $3,380,329, or an average of $73,485 per recipient.
Map of the top 1% of Minnesota farm subsidy recipients in 2024
Source: EWG, from EWG’s Farm Subsidy Database
Most Minnesota farmers who take in farm subsidies get small payments. In 2024, the bottom 80% of recipients collected only 28% of commodity subsidies. These 3,730 recipients together got $5,496,093, an average payment of just $1,473 per recipient.
The budget bills would also send the largest farm subsidy payments to growers of rice, peanut and cotton, because the legislation would increase the price guarantees for these crops the most out of all commodities.
But Minnesota’s main crops are corn and soybeans, which make up over 60% of total farmed acres in the state. And they won’t benefit from the farm subsidy changes nearly as much as rice, peanut and cotton farmers.
The bills would also allow every member of a farm organized as a pass-through entity, including joint ventures, S corporations or limited liability corporations, to collect up to $155,000 a year each. But only 3,803 farms are set up as corporations out of over 65,000 total farms in Minnesota. This is a small share of the over 100,000 total farms in the U.S. organized as corporations.
Farm subsidies and food assistance
It’s clear Minnesota farmers will not benefit much from the farm subsidy provisions of the budget bills.
But the food assistance cuts in the same bills would devastate Minnesotans.
A previous EWG analysis of the House bill found that in Minnesota, only 29 counties could gain more funding in farm subsidies than they would lose in cuts to SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. That means 58 Minnesota counties could lose more money than they would gain by the House proposals. And the state’s net loss in total funding could reach almost $2 billion.
Few Minnesota farmers would benefit significantly from higher farm subsidies. Lawmakers should not cut desperately needed food assistance to help finance more payouts to relatively few farmers. An increase in these payments at the expense of hungry people would seriously harm millions of people nationwide while benefiting few farmers.
