The grass is always greener for “fairway farmers” who, despite living next to golf courses instead of crop land, have raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from the first round of President Trump’s trade war bailout program.
The Market Facilitation Program has to date paid out $16 billion in taxpayer funds, which were supposed to help farmers struggling from the loss of access to the Chinese market. Instead, EWG investigations show that MFP money has overwhelmingly gone to the big farms that already get millions of dollars in crop subsidies, and to “city slickers” who live in the nation’s largest metro areas or exclusive developments near golf courses. What’s more, thousands of MFP recipients have received over the maximum payment limit.
We expect many of these rich farmers and city slickers to take a mulligan in the second round of payments, teed up to start flowing any day now. But this is all par for the course in the Big Ag clubhouse, which has long exploited loopholes in farm law to harvest big money.
Click through the slideshow for a look at the spreads of these fairway farmers. (All images courtesy of Google Street View.)