In the high plains of western Texas, 600 or so farms in Gaines County are projected to receive an additional $258 million in government payments over the next decade under President Trump’s marquee domestic policy law — the largest increase in the country.

By contrast, along the coast of California, 1,000 farms in Monterey County will collectively receive just $390,000 in additional payments, according to one analysis.

The difference comes down to what the farms grow, and illustrates the stark disparity in who stands to benefit from the president’s sweeping tax and domestic policy bill. Under the new law, more than $60 billion in additional funding will be funneled toward agricultural subsidy programs, with large farms, particularly those in the South, poised to reap the most benefits.

For those farmers, the law will provide reprieve from financial uncertainty caused by volatile global markets and high costs of fertilizer, equipment and other resources. But owners of smaller farms and independent producers who grow fresh fruits and vegetables or raise livestock have expressed concern that the distribution of funding will only deepen the consolidation of an industry that has lost over 300,000 farms in the past two decades.

“The monies are not flowing to small- and medium-sized family farms,” said Vincent H. Smith, an agricultural economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. “They’re flowing overwhelmingly to the largest producers.”

The bulk of the funding — more than $50 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office — will go toward increasing payments to farmers enrolled in price and revenue support programs covering 22 commodity crops, or major crops like corn and soybeans. The law also makes an additional 30 million acres of land available for the programs. Another provision, worth about $6 billion, increases subsidies for crop insurance.

Under the revenue support programs, the government doles out payments if market prices of a particular crop drop below a certain level determined by law, known as a “reference price.” The new law increases reference prices by 10 to 20 percent depending on the crop, with peanuts, rice and cotton seeing the largest bumps. Altogether, farmers of those crops, which are concentrated in the South, are expected to see the biggest benefits.

Farmers who raise these crops say the changes will be a lifeline in difficult times, staving off the threat of food imports and preventing farm bankruptcies.

“It’ll help me survive,” LG Raun, who grows rice on 2,200 acres in eastern Texas, said one morning this month as he waited for the dew to evaporate so he could start his harvest.

Mr. Raun noted that his own cost of production had increased by 40 percent since 2014, when fixed reference prices were last updated. The Texas rice belt was also battered by two years of drought before Hurricane Beryl struck last summer, by one estimate reducing yields by 25 percent. And the Agriculture Department has forecast another decline in rice prices this year, the third in a row.

Mr. Raun, who is also a board member of USA Rice Farmers, a trade group, said he knew of several farmers who had taken on additional debt to weather financial losses. Despite the increased reference price for his crop, Mr. Raun said he would still be short on cash. “I will still lose money for this year,” he said. “It truly is a safety net because it doesn’t make you whole.”

But for farmers who do not grow covered commodities, the law may worsen existing challenges.

Bryce Loewen, who grows peaches, plums and other fruits on a 78-acre farm in the Central Valley of California, said he was not eligible for the programs receiving a vast majority of the funding increases in the new law.

Instead, he anticipates losing revenue as a result of another aspect of the law, one that makes sharp cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or food stamps. At least six regular customers rely on food stamps to purchase from his farmers’ market stall, Mr. Loewen estimated, and he expects that peaches — a “luxury item if you’re trying to make your dollars stretch” — will be one of the first products that beneficiaries forgo.

“Taking that away not only hurts the people that really kind of need the assistance the most, it also is going to affect farms like ours that benefit financially,” he said.

“Another thing about this bill that’s so upsetting is it really picks and chooses where that assistance is going,” Mr. Loewen added. “And at least in my reading of it, it almost exclusively is helping large ag.”

Even as farm and commodity groups applauded the law’s increased funding for subsidy programs, a number of critics agreed with Mr. Loewen’s assessment.

The influential Farm Bureau called the agricultural provisions “desperately needed.”

But the National Family Farm Coalition, which supports smaller farms, warned that the law was short sighted, unnecessarily favoring large corporations. The law “perpetuates a decades-long decline of forward-thinking food and farm policy that has undermined independent agricultural producers to benefit corporate agribusinesses,” the group said in a statement.

About a quarter of the 880 million acres of farmland in the United States is enrolled in the two price-support programs. But because payments are made per acre and thus scale up with production, the programs disproportionately benefit the wealthiest.

Though large family farms — those making $1 million or more annually — and corporate farms amounted to less than 8 percent of all farms in the United States, they received about 47 percent of subsidy payments and 67 percent of crop insurance payments in 2024, according to the Agriculture Department. The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit advocacy group, estimates that the top 20 percent of farm subsidy recipients in 2024 received 80 percent of payments.

Payments to the largest and wealthiest will only increase under the new law, experts said. Other provisions in the law raise the annual maximum amount paid to farmers, lifting a previous income cap of $900,000 and removing a requirement for recipients to be “actively engaged in farming.”

These changes will “send millions of dollars to absentee owners living in the middle of America’s biggest cities,” Ken Cook, the president of the Environmental Working Group, said in a news conference last month.

Jonathan Coppess, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who is a co-author of the analysis of payments by county, warned of the consequences. Altogether, he said, the law most “likely has an impact on consolidation at the local level, as those farmers with more payments can drive up cash rents and land prices, running smaller farmers out of business.”

At 71, Mr. Raun said that he did not expect to expand his farm any further, and that the bump in reference prices would not provide him with enough cash to do so, anyway. But he insisted that downsizing or remaining small was not an option for many rice farmers: “We’re having to get larger, because you can’t farm 100 acres or 200 acres and even afford a tractor to plant the crop,” he said.

Faced with fluctuating global prices and competition from rice farmers in Southeast Asia and India, Mr. Raun said that farm subsidies kept operations like his from going out of business, regardless of their size.

“We’re not paying farmers unless they get into a desperate situation,” he said, adding: “If we’re doing good, government doesn’t come in and subsidize this. It only does when we could go broke.”