recipients to be “actively engaged in farming.” However, a closer look at the official definition of “actively engaged” reveals potential avenues for payments to be made outside the program’s stated intent. To qualify, recipients are typically required to perform some kind of farm labor. But landowners and individuals in vaguely defined managerial positions can qualify, even if they don’t work on-site. All this is to say—and the new findings show—that you don’t necessarily need to be a farmer to receive bailout money meant for farmers.

EWG calculated its city-dweller count by filtering MFP recipients based on residency in a zipcode within one of America’s 50 largest cities. The results are noteworthy because MFP eligibility rules require

In June, we reported that hundreds of farms had received far more in MFP payments than the program’s limit of $125,000, through a loophole that allows individual family members to each apply for separate payments. The report noted that the most recent farm bill expanded qualifying family members to include nieces, nephews, first cousins, and their spouses, which could lead to higher per-farm payment totals this year.