One thing it does not resemble is a farm, which is significant only because one building resident, located on the 12th floor, has an odd distinction. According to data from the Environmental Working Group, one unit at 38 Monroe Street is home to K & T Farm Corp, which received $100,000 in farm subsidies in 2010 – more than anyone else in New York City.
The farm, records show, is actually located in Burlington County, N.J., and much of the subsidy was a disaster recovery payment for storms and flooding that hit the state in 2008. The farm's owner of record, Tin Sang Ip of Monroe Street, could not be reached for comment. But the payments – along with about $54,000 in 2008 and a few thousand dollars in previous years – put him in eclectic company, among the top farm subsidy recipients based in Manhattan, that least rural of American counties.
Local link to a national debate
With negotiations well underway on the 2012 revision of the federal Farm Bill and congressional leaders across party lines eyeing spending cuts, subsidy payments nationwide are under scrutiny. And while farm subsidy payments to New York residents are a relative drop in the bucket – the state received $62.5 million in subsidies in 2010, or 0.4 percent of the $15.2 billion that was given out nationally – the list of the city's top recipients illustrates the quirks and complexities of federal farm support programs.
Besides Ip, of K & T, they include Scamman & Co., LLC, an entity that runs a farm in Missouri and is partly owned by a Bloomberg News energy reporter. Also on the list is Rohde Sisters Farm, in North Dakota, owned by two sisters who grew up in the state – one a Washington lobbyist and the other a public relations executive who lives on the Upper East Side.
They're joined by a former Lehman Brothers financial adviser with a farm in Illinois and a Queens neurologist with a farm in Wilcox County, Ala.
Receiving the second-highest subsidy in 2010 was Romano-Johnstone LLC, an entity controlled by people and trusts in Fort Worth, Texas and Tulsa, Okla. The farm it operates is in Kearny County, Kan. The subsidy checks – $71,211 in 2010, a combination of disaster relief and direct subsidies for barley, sorghum and wheat – go to an apartment on Amsterdam Avenue.
'Temporary' help looks permanent
While the federal government has provided financial support for agriculture for more than a century, subsidies grew dramatically in the 1930s as part of the New Deal. Programs introduced in that era, many of which remained in place for decades, included guaranteed minimum crop prices, government purchases of excess crops, and payments to farmers to stop using some land – a move intended to curb overproduction and keep prices up.
Today, in the national debate over farm subsidies, the direct payments given to producers of specified Program Crops are the most controversial.
The Program Crops arrangement was established in 1996 under the "Freedom to Farm" law, an effort by free-market proponents to help growers of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and rice reduce their dependency on subsidies over time.
The idea was to pay traditional growers of those crops a fixed annual amount, regardless of what they actually choose to grow. Since the payments do not require owners of land that has traditionally been used for, say, corn to grow corn, the owner, in theory, is free to risk introducing other crops without losing steady income. Under the original law, the fixed payments were to decrease over time as farmers of the Program Crops diversified and eventually required less support.
