The European Union, we learned, maintains a database with all this information. But when we requested it, officials responded both that the data did not exist and that it did exist but could not easily be extracted. When we pointed out that the European Union had previously managed to extract the information for a World Bank study, they said the data was private. We appealed. We were denied again. Downloading the information from the government’s own computers was so complicated, officials said, that they could not be forced to do it.

We appealed again. But in the meantime, Selam and I went around them. We started with the national records and supplemented them with information obtained by former officials, whistle-blowers and local journalists. Selam and another colleague, Agustin Armendariz, wrote automated scripts to download payment data, parse Hungarian and Czech names, and look for patterns. Our colleague in Budapest, Benjamin Novak, tracked down a former senior Hungarian agricultural official, Jozsef Angyan, who had compiled a trove of land records. Torbjörn Jansson, an agricultural scientist, gave us subsidy data from a complex model that is regularly used by the European Union’s own scientists.

We were also particularly interested in figuring out how much money was going to the Agrofert, a company founded by the Czech prime minister, Andrej Babis. So we set out to compile a list of the company’s many subsidiaries. We consulted Agrofert’s annual reports, in Czech, along with a Czech watchdog and a Warsaw-based corporate intelligence firm, to make sure we had the full picture.

All this data, unfortunately, is still incomplete. It should not be this hard for the public to scrutinize one of Europe’s key policies.

Image A dinner of homemade sausage and fresh tomatoes in a tiny farmhouse kitchen with the Hungarian farmer Istvan Teichel. Credit... Matt Apuzzo/The New York Times

The bureaucracy was one obstacle. Fear was another. On my first trip to Hungary, Ben and I met with an environmental scientist who specializes in agriculture. When I explained what we were trying to do — link government subsidies to landowners — the conversation ground to an awkward halt. The scientist said he did not know much about farmland use. He did not even know where most farmland could be found. He did not want to talk about his research, and could we please keep him out of our article?