Launching OpenSubsidies: $147 Billion in Farm Subsidies, Exposed

Today we're launching OpenSubsidies — a free platform that lets anyone explore $147 billion in USDA Farm Service Agency payments from 2017 to 2025. With 31.8 million payment records across 157 programs, 59 states and territories, and 28,875 counties, it's the most comprehensive open-access farm subsidy explorer available.

Why Farm Subsidies Matter

The federal government spends roughly $16 billion per year on farm subsidies — more than the budgets of many federal agencies. Yet most Americans have no idea where this money goes, who receives it, or which programs it funds. The data exists in USDA Excel spreadsheets, but until now there's been no modern, free way to explore it.

The main existing resource — the Environmental Working Group's farm subsidy database — runs on aging infrastructure with a clunky interface and limited analytical tools. We built OpenSubsidies to fill that gap with modern UX, deeper analysis, and interactive tools.

$147.3 billion tracked

31.8 million payments across 157 programs, 59 states, and 28,875 counties — every dollar searchable.

What We Found

Processing nine years of FSA payment data revealed patterns that challenge conventional narratives about farm subsidies:

COVID changed everything: In 2020, farm subsidies hit $38.7 billion — more than double the previous peak — driven by emergency CFAP payments. The emergency spending reshaped the entire subsidy landscape.
46 zombie programs: Dozens of programs that made a handful of payments years ago still technically exist in the system, consuming administrative overhead.
Extreme concentration: The top 1% of recipients collect a disproportionate share of total payments, while 69% of American farms receive nothing at all.
Geographic disparities: Texas leads at $14.5 billion, while some states receive less per capita than others spend on a single program.
157 programs: From the well-known Conservation Reserve Program ($15.7B) to obscure livestock disaster programs — the system is far more complex than most people realize.

What You Can Do

OpenSubsidies isn't just a lookup tool. We built 10 interactive tools and 22 original analysis articles to help you understand the data:

Subsidy Quiz: Test your knowledge of farm subsidy facts
County Finder: See exactly what your county receives
Taxpayer Calculator: How much of your taxes go to farm subsidies
State Comparison: Compare any two states side-by-side
Program Explorer: Drill into any of 157 FSA programs
Timeline Explorer: Watch how subsidies shifted from trade wars to COVID to disaster spending

Our analysis articles cover everything from how COVID reshaped farm spending to zombie programs still on the books to what a DOGE-style efficiency review would find.

8,000+ explorable pages

Every state, county, program, and top recipient has a dedicated detail page with charts, insights, and cross-links.

The Data Pipeline

Building OpenSubsidies required processing 82 Excel files from USDA's Farm Service Agency — totaling over 678MB of raw data. The files span 2017 through 2025, with some files exceeding 35MB each.

Standard libraries couldn't handle files this large on our 16GB development machine, so we built a custom streaming XML parser that processes Excel files without loading them entirely into memory. The pipeline extracts payment records, normalizes program names, assigns FIPS codes to counties, and generates the JSON files that power the site.

The result: 5,000 recipient detail files, 3,087 county detail files, 59 state detail files, 157 program pages, and 9 year-over-year trend pages — all generated from a single data pipeline.

Part of TheDataProject Portfolio

OpenSubsidies is our ninth platform, joining:

OpenMedicare — $854B in Medicare payments with ML fraud detection
OpenMedicaid — $1.09 trillion in Medicaid provider payments
OpenLobby — $37.7B in federal lobbying, 726K+ filings
VaccineWatch — 1.98M VAERS reports, signal detection tools
OpenImmigration — 9.6M immigration court cases, full spectrum data
OpenFeds, OpenSpending — Federal workforce and spending data

Explore OpenSubsidies

Visit opensubsidies.org to search any recipient, explore your state's subsidies, compare programs, and see where $147 billion in farm payments really goes. Everything is free, open, and requires no account.

OpenSubsidies is built by TheDataProject.AI — making public data usable, searchable, and accessible to everyone.