미국 농무성에서는 최근 정책 입안자와 농업 그룹이 2012 농업법을 논의하는 데 도움이 되길 바라며 새로운 도구를 발표했다. 그것은 미국 전역에 걸쳐 농무성에서 7가지 최고 농업프로그램에 지출하는 수십억 달러의 시각화 지도이다.
"우리는 이러한 프로그램들이 실제로 전국 각지에서 지리적으로 어떻게 분배되는지와 이러한 주요 연방 프로그램에 참여하여 받는 혜택을 시각적으로 나타내고자 했다"고 미국 농무성의 Economic Research Service 및 지도의 제작자 가운데 하나인 Erik O'Donoghue는 말한다.
"우린 특히 다가오는 농업법과 함께 연방 농업프로그램에 관한 논의를 알리길 바란다.".
Right now, the ERS Farm Program Atlas only shows 2009 data for federal farm programs, but ERS David Nulph says they're hoping to add in historical data and future years as well.
The data has been available on their website for years, but for the non-farm policy wonks among us, the vast tables and reports are challenging to interpret and it's hard to get a sense of where the money is going across the country. This new atlas breaks down the data by county, so the concentration of benefits is immediately apparent, with stark visual contrast.
The Environmental Working Group has a database that's much more about tracking whogets the money, and how much. And because their website breaks down farm payments from 1995 to 2010 it's easy to see trends and changes.
But the ERS had different goals with their atlas, O'Donoghue said. They wanted users to be able to see specifically what crops and geographic areas are benefiting from government programs and even to be able to compare different counties to see which were drawing more benefits per acre of cropland.
For example, a user could select to see "total counter-cyclical payments per cropland acre." The map that pops up shows dark patches across the southern third of the country, but hardly a dot in the corn belt. That's because in 2009 corn and soybean prices were high – way too high to trigger countercyclical payments, which are set to kick in if commodity prices drop too low. But in the south, cotton and wheat didn't fare as well and government programs paid out.
Still, the map doesn’t make it easy to see just how much government programs paid out in 2009 – it’s a visual tool, not really a numbers tool. If you want to know how much the government paid wheat and cotton farmers that year, you'd have to go back to the tables and do your own math.
The Farm Program Atlas team doesn't necessarily expect the tool to have widespread interest. You have to know what the farm programs are and how they work for it to be useful. But farmers might be curious to see that a neighboring county received more direct payments, even when broken down by cropland acre.
"Researchers may even be able to look at this and get some ideas for either future research or to see how things distributed geographically," said O'Donoghue.
Nulph added that the Farm Program Atlas is one of several projects the ERS has done to take USDA data and make it accessible for the public. Previously, they created the Food Environment Atlas, which breaks down health, food stamps, food insecurity and access to local foods by county across the U.S. They also created a Food Desert Locator, which shows areas in the country where people have little access to grocery stores.
