Super-rich New York city slickers are harvesting big checks from government programs originally set up to save poor family farmers during the Great Depression.
Among the dozens of billionaire sod-busters on both Forbes magazine’s rich list and the federal farm welfare rolls is banker and philanthropist David Rockefeller Sr., who reaped $29,615 from the corn-subsidy program in 2005.
Rockefeller, worth an estimated $2.6 billion, got the government money for farms in Westchester and Columbia counties, according to a database compiled by the Environmental Working Group lobbying organization.
Through a spokesman, Rockefeller, 92, said he’s unlikely to take any more of the money – and that he believes the system needs reform.
Celebrities outside the Big Apple have also turned up on the subsidy list. David Letterman, who lives on a spread in Connecticut, got $8,023 for his Montana ranch from 2003 to 2005. He gave the money to charity.
Former NBA star Scottie Pippen ($78,945) and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen ($30,786) also rode Uncle Sam’s hay wagon to farm subsidies.
Other New York billionaires raking in taxpayer agriculture money between 2003 and 2005 included Seagram’s mogul Edgar Bronfman Sr., who got $17,455 for farms in Virginia.
Leonard Lauder, a billionaire member of the Estée Lauder family, got $3,974 for his 5 percent share in an organic dairy farm in Idaho.
Brooklyn resident Wanatha Garner is the city’s biggest farm-aid recipient.
Garner, listed in the EWG database as an owner of Garner Land Co., got $218,930 in subsidies from 2003 to 2005 for farmland in Arkansas from programs that promote rice, wheat, cotton, soybeans, sorghum, corn and sunflower crops.
More than 500 Manhattan hayseeds are raking in federal farm dollars. Phyllis Joyner got the most of any Manhattanite from 2003 to 2005, taking in $213,998 in crop subsidies for her share of her family’s farms in Virginia, the data shows.
Answering the phone in her East Village apartment, Joyner said she’s a retiree from an old farming family, and doesn’t consider herself a Manhattan resident.
“I’m actually in Virginia receiving farm subsidies,” she said. “I just come up here sometimes.”
Advocacy groups on the left and right as well as President Bush want to curb farm subsidies to the wealthy. “There’s a wide variety of strange bedfellows coming together to seek reform,” said EWG analyst Michelle Perez.
But lawmakers from big farm states hold sway in the House and Senate Agriculture committees and are successfully resisting change, Perez said.
At least six US senators have received farm subsidy checks totaling five figures or higher.
Additional reportingby David K. Li