Finding Free Money

The 1996 Freedom to Farm Act contained a provision that allowed landowners or tenant farmers to receive an annual payment even if they planted no crops. Six years later, the federal government tried to measure how much of that money, now known as direct and countercyclical payments, went to those who did not farm.

The conclusion: Its data were insufficient to allow for an estimate.

The Washington Post sought on its own to document the amount. The newspaper interviewed individual landowners and analyzed county production records, government surveys of farmers, the Census of Agriculture and a database of 217 million payment records dating to 1990.

Virtually all working farmers who receive the annual payment also receive other subsidies that are related to their farm's production, including disaster payments and price supports.

To find individuals who collect the annual payment even though they do not farm, The Post looked for those who had received that money but claimed none of the other subsidies over six years. Those who fell into this category collected $1.3 billion over the six-year period, about 3 percent of the total.

That figure excludes payments to landowners who agree not to farm as part of the government's "soil bank," now called the Conservation Reserve Program.

-- Sarah Cohen