Briefs

NPR, by John Burnett

Morning Edition, November 16, 2005 � The growth in cases of multi-million-dollar agriculture fraud has prompted the federal government to step up its policing of farm country.

Once reliant on the honor system, the U.S. Department of Agriculture now looks over the farmer's shoulder to make sure he's not cheating the system. To do this, investigators rely on an array of high-tech techniques.

John Brown is an agricultural private investigator in a tiny but busy field these days. As the only satellite-imagery farm detective in the country, he's testified as an expert witness in 26 cases over the past six years, mostly for the government prosecuting farmers.

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The agency that oversees crop insurance, the Risk Management Agency, contracted with a data-mining company near Fort Worth, Texas, to analyze millions and millions of farm records to look for anomalies.

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