Manhattan 'Farmers' Receive Budget Boondoggle Award

A farm policy that gives hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal subsidies to Manhattan "farmers" is the recipient of the latest Budget Boondoggle Award from Republican members of Congress.

More than 300 New Yorkers, including Mark Rockefeller, a son of Nelson Rockefeller, and a former CEO of The Seagram Company Ltd., Edgar Bronfman, received farming subsidies from the federal government in 2005, according to the Republican caucus of the Committee on the Budget.

The top recipient from New York City collected nearly $214,000 in subsidies between 2003 and 2005, according to the most recent data available.

In an open letter to their colleagues, two congressmen wrote that the subsidies to Manhattan farmers are a true example of government waste. "The American taxpayer deserves better than having their taxpayer dollars used to pay urban 'farmers' in Manhattan," Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Rep. Joseph Knollenberg of Michigan said.

The award is intended to point out that federal funding is funneled to wealthy New Yorkers who live on the densely packed island of Manhattan, nowhere near a farm. Most New Yorkers on the list are not farming in the city but own farms outside New York.

Deliberations over a new farm bill are under way, and Congress is supposed to reach an agreement by April 18. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has proposed that the bill give subsidies only to farmers whose adjusted gross income is less than $200,000 a year.

Mr. Knollenberg, who supports an income cap for farm subsidies, said that under the current plan federal funding is given away to millionaires, CEOs, and entrepreneurs.

"The farmers in Manhattan aren't dumb. They know what they are doing. They are making money on the property and they are making money on the subsidy that is passed along with it, and I guess they are doing it because they can," he said.

Mr. Rockefeller, the founder and CEO of Sponsor Direct, was given $137,010 in federal subsidies between 2003 and 2005, according to a searchable database of farm subsidy recipients on the Web site of the Environmental Working Group. He did not respond to a request for an interview left with a representative from his company. Phyllis Joyner, who splits her time between Manhattan and Virginia, topped the list of New Yorkers receiving farm subsidies, pulling in $213,998 between 2003 and 2005.

Ms. Joyner, 75, said her family owns several small farms in Suffolk, Va., where it grows soybeans, corn, and occasionally wheat and cotton. She said she used her New York residence as her primary address because her building has a doorman and it was easier to have her mail held there, but that she recently changed her primary address to Virginia.

Farming is a difficult business with high costs, Ms. Joyner said, adding that farm subsidies have a bad name because of payments that go to large corporate farms, which she said are primarily in the Midwest.

East Coast farms are run by "people who have been there for hundreds of years and they grew up in it and they are training their children in it, otherwise they couldn't do it," she said. "No one would do it unless they were born into it."