Opinion

A load of crop

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These New Yorkers are raking in the green.

More than 1,500 city residents are getting federal farm subsidies, 374 on the Upper East Side alone.

The recipients include some “farmers” who already have their own well-cultivated money trees, among them Mark F. Rockefeller.

“That should really make people wonder what on earth has happened to the farm program,” said Craig Cox, senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources at the Environmental Working Group, which maintains a national database of farm-subsidy recipients.

“Payments are going to people in Manhattan who simply have invested in farmland and are about as far away from farmers as one could imagine.”

Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the family and the younger son of late Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, has gotten $342,634 in taxpayer handouts from 2001 through 2011 for thousands of acres of unused farmland he owns in Bonneville County, Idaho. The payments are made so that he does not farm, to allow the land to return to its natural state.

Nearby, Rockeller, a partner in investment firm Rockefeller Consulting/Insight Capitalists and a former director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, owns an upscale fly-fishing resort where a three-day stay starts at $3,835.

Rockefeller did not respond to a request for comment.

His subsidy is for conservation purposes. Other subsidies come in the form of disaster payments, which allow farmers to recoup losses from drought, frost, hurricanes or tornadoes, or commodity payments, to regulate the prices for crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat.

Other rich and famous New Yorkers receiving farm subsidies include cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder and corporate-takeover king Henry Kravis. But both men got their subsidies indirectly through investments they made — Lauder in Horizon Dairy, which makes organic milk, and Kravis in an 8,120-acre working ranch southwest of Chico, Calif., that produces almonds, dried plums, walnuts and rice.

Among New York City’s other top recipients are the managing director at Wells Fargo, W. Phillip Walsh; Dina Shapiro Fried on the Upper East Side, whose husband owns a development company, and Ricardo L. Rengifo, a Queens neurologist.

Walsh received $344,493, mostly in conservation subsidies, from 2002 through 2011 for 425 acres of farmland in Winnebago County, Ill., where he is from.

Fried is one of four Shapiros who together own a farm in upstate Slate Hill through an LLC. They received a total of $826,406 in commodity and conservation subsidies from 1999 through 2010.

Rengifo got $591,315 in subsidies from 1995 through 2011 for a 1,400-acre farm in Alabama for which he received direct subsidies for wheat and conservation.

Walsh could not be reached. Fried and Rengifo did not return phone messages.

Sen. Thomas Coburn (R-Okla.) issued a report a year ago, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” that found $316 million in farm subsidies going to millionaires across the country.

“The government’s social safety net, which has long existed to catch those who are down and help them get back up, is now being used as a hammock by some millionaires, some who are paying less taxes than average middle class families,” he wrote.

Congress has tried to rein in payments to the wealthy and in October 2011 the Senate voted to end direct payments to anyone with an income of more than $1 million, but the House never approved the measure.

Buried in last week’s deal to avoid hurtling over the fiscal cliff was an extension of the Farm Bill that will give Congress time to debate its food and farm policies, but for now continues the subsidies for gentlemen “farmers.”