Lots of North Dakota and Minnesota farmers would lose federal subsidies under President Barack Obama’s budget released last week. Under Obama’s plan, direct payments to crop growers, one of the key farm subsidies, would be ended to large farmers, those with annual sales revenue of more than $500,000.
Grand Forks Herald, Stephen J. Lee
Published March 1, 2009
Lots of North Dakota and Minnesota farmers would lose federal subsidies under President Barack Obama’s budget released last week.
Under Obama’s plan, direct payments to crop growers, one of the key farm subsidies, would be ended to large farmers, those with annual sales revenue of more than $500,000.
Leap and bound
That sounds big, but with higher crop prices the past two years and the big surge in corn acres, the number of North Dakota farmers who sold $500,000 or more in crops in 2007 grew by a leap and a bound.
A full 11.3 percent of North Dakota’s 31,970 farms in 2007, or 3,625, sold crops worth more than $500,000. The number of such sized farms was only 1,227 in 2002 and 702 in 1997.
Because the total number of farms includes some 10,000 which are small and not commercially viable and don’t get subsidies, the percent of full-time, commercial farms in North Dakota that would lose their direct payments under Obama’s plan would be closer to 20 percent.
The average size of a North Dakota farm was 1,241 in 2007. If the average farm was planted to soybeans, spring wheat and corn, in rough thirds, with conservative yields for the greater Red River Valley (40 bushels for wheat, 35 for beans, 130 for corn) , and average prices received in 2007, the gross crop sales revenue would have been more than $500,000.
The fact is, many Red River Valley farmers farm much more than 1,240 acres. Many raised 1,000 or more acres just of corn each of the past two years, and that alone would gross more than $500,000 in sales.
In 2007, Minnesota had 6,426 farms with sales more than $500,000, Census figures show, and a big chunk of them would be in the Red River Valley.
Minnesota had 80,992 farms that year, so the farms with more than $500,000 in crop sale revenue equaled 7.9 percent of the total farms.
North Dakota ranked eighth out of the 50 states in the amount of federal farm subsidies handed out from 1995-2006, according to data collected by the Environmental Working Group and available online. In 2007, North Dakota ranked ninth in direct payments, with a total of $222.2 million in direct payments going to the state’s farmers.
The top five North Dakota farms in direct payments in 2007 were in the Red River Valley, receiving amounts ranging from $165,735 to $287,408.
