Senate OKs huge farm bill, puts House GOP on spot

Washington -- The Senate's passage Thursday of a nearly $1 trillion farm bill with bipartisan support presented House Republicans and their antideficit Tea Party faction with a huge spending bill that subsidizes large corn and other commodity farmers while spending record sums on food stamps.

The House Agriculture Committee delayed consideration of its version until after Congress returns from its recess July 11. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., ordered a slowdown to assess the political ramifications. The House Republican majority includes several lawmakers from rural states whose championship of farm subsidies has often trumped their claims of fiscal austerity.

The 64-35 Senate passage has House Republican leaders "worried about bringing a nearly $1 trillion bill to the floor this summer when all the talk about been about cut, cut, cut," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group, especially because the bill is 60 percent more expensive than the last farm bill in 2008.

The farm bill, renewed every five years, helps shape the American diet and sets environmental policy on 922 million acres of land, or 40 percent of the nation, including a quarter of California.

Food stamps consume about 80 percent of the Senate bill's $969 billion cost over the coming decade. Food stamp spending has doubled since 2008 as a result of the recession, with about 1 in 7 Americans receiving assistance.

State preserves funds

The bill would make crop insurance the primary means of direct farm support. Total spending on corn and other commodities would reach $142 billion at a time when farmers are riding a historic commodity boom. The bill trimmed overall spending by $23 billion, or 2.3 percent, and cut conservation programs by 10 percent.

California produce growers, after decades of being ignored in federal farm programs, flexed their newfound muscle by preserving funds won five years ago that purchase fresh fruits and vegetables for schools and other federal food programs.

Food activists, environmentalists and fiscal conservatives won key amendments that require farmers to conserve soil, wetlands and grasslands in return for federal aid, and that trim crop insurance subsidies to farmers who earn more than $750,000 a year.

Still, the Senate bill represents incremental change, not the overhaul that the food movement, born in the Bay Area, has been demanding with increasing ferocity over the past decade.

The bill continues to direct most of its farm support to corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, rice, dairy and other commodities, just as it has since farm programs began in 1933. Those benefits, as they have for decades, continue to accrue to the largest farms, hastening farm industrialization and specialization.

The bill was a debut for the new committee chair, Rep. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., whose state farms mainly produce.

Stabenow and top committee Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas hailed the bill as a major reform that cut the deficit and consolidated hundreds of programs while killing traditional commodity subsidies and shifting farm support to crop insurance.

Although taxpayers pick up on average two-thirds of the cost of the crop insurance premiums, farmers also have to pony up money and do not collect payouts unless they show losses.

Rare alliances

Still, Midwestern corn and soybean growers and Southern cotton growers won new entitlement programs that will have taxpayers cover the cost of small dips in their incomes that most businesses routinely weather without aid.

Senate leaders allowed 73 amendments, with little debate. Unlike most partisan issues that consume Washington, the farm bill pitted rural against urban interests, encouraging rare bipartisan alliances of liberal and conservative lawmakers.

Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn joined Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin on the amendment that limited insurance subsidies to wealthy farmers.

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