Part of a recent USDA study analyzed the types of government program and crop insurance payments and how they apply across various sized family farms.
The type of USDA government payment or federal crop insurance farms receive depend on the nature of the program themselves.
Further illustration of this comes from the USDA’s latest study of America’s diverse family farms.
Christine Whitt of the Economic Research Service says one example from the study that covered 2018 is the Conservation Reserve Program payments.
“[The payments] are typically targeted towards taking environmentally sensitive land out of production, and the majority of these payments are going towards retirement, off-farm occupation and low sales farm,” she said. “A lot of these farms aren’t doing the high commodity production, they’re getting these program payments.”
Other findings show 76 percent of commodity-related program payments wen to moderate sales, midsize and large family farms. As for working lands conservation payments, the breakdown was fairly even among large, midsize and small family farms.
