Explaining the source of racial disparities in market facilitation program payments

Abstract

This paper provides new insights on the distribution of agricultural government payments by farm operator race and the sources of disparities. We use farm-level data from the Census of Agriculture to estimate the payments each farm was eligible to receive from the 2018 and 2019 Market Facilitation Program. We find that farms with a White operator were eligible to receive significantly more payments than farms with a non-White operator. Most of the disparity for farms with a Black operator is due to differences in average farm size, because there are few large farms with a Black operator. The disparities for farms with an American Indian, Asian, or Pacific Islander operator were roughly half due to farm size and half due to the location of these farms and the types of commodities they tend to produce.