Spying or Acurate Record Keeping–you be the judge. The USDA is doing a multi-million dollar photographic survey of every farm in America to verify that famers who recieve subsidies are doing what they should.

This information is tied into an on-line interactive photographic map which allows the USDA or its affiliates to zero in on different layers of data about the monitored farms.

Stroup works for the USDA’s Farm Service Agency. He’s responsible for monitoring several million dollars in federal payments every year to about 1500 farmers in two counties in Eastern Kansas. He displays one of those new aerial photos on his computer. It shows one small corner of Johnson County. But there’s more here than just a photo. Laid out on top of the checkerboard of green and brown fields are red lines. They show the field boundaries. And when Stroup clicks inside the lines, he uncovers a hidden storehouse of information.

"I’ve selected three different fields right here," he says. "I can open the table and show the attributes — or the data — on those three fields. I’ve got the acres, and two of those fields are highly erodible land." (Farmers are required to take special precautions to reduce soil erosion on such fields.)

Another click, and the map shows what farmers promised to plant on those fields. Stroup can see whether the picture in front of him matches those promises. The other day, he says, he was looking at a field that a farmer had enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP. This program pays farmers to convert cropland into grassland or forest, in order to preserve soil and create more habitat for wildlife. He saw "what appeared to me like a lot of big round hay bales out there. And I thought, ‘Hmm. That don’t look quite right. Did this person go out and hay their CRP [field] when they didn’t have authorization to do that?’" When he drove out to look, though, those round shapes turned out to be newly planted trees, which are permitted.

Stroup, and other USDA officials, don’t like to call this spying on farmers, and they prefer not to talk about farmers cheating. They say it’s mostly just a way to keep their records accurate; most farmers do obey the rules. The USDA’s critics, such as the congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO), say the USDA is far too lenient in enforcing the rules governing federal subsidies. According to a GAO report, tens of millions of taxpayer dollars continue to flow to growers who’ve broken the rules by plowing up native prairie, or draining wetlands. The new system should help catch those violations.

 

Watch Out–Big Brother is watching!

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