Click here to see a map of payments from the USDA's Market Facilitation Program
The data forming the basis of our data analysis came from 24 USDA spreadsheets that contained data for all payments made through agency programs from 2018, the first year of MFP, until 2020, when the last payments were disbursed.
We combined the spreadsheets into a single database and filtered out everything but the MFP. Within the MFP, there were separate rules governing payments for dairy, livestock, specialty and non-specialty crop producers. For simplicity, we decided to focus on non-specialty crops, which received 94% of the money disbursed in the MFP.
This left us with more than 3 million rows of data, with each row describing a single payment issued in the program. MFP payments were issued in several installments, rather than a lump sum, and we wanted to know the total amount paid to each individual over the course of the program.
Using SQLite, a programming language, we grouped the rows by name and address, leaving us with around 754,000 unique name and address pairs, along with the sum of all the payments made to that recipient. This was the data we geocoded and used in our interactive map.
But with such a large dataset behind the map, the tiles forming the map were too large. To trim down the tile sizes, we limited the visibility of data at certain zoom ranges. That means some points are only visible at certain zoom ranges.