The Senate version of the farm bill, although it retains financing for food stamps, contains many of the same generous farm subsidies.

“Right now, the federal government favors the big guy over the little guy,” Congressman Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, who is the chairman of the House budget committee and a former Republican candidate for vice president, told me this week. “We subsidize large agribusiness and the wealthy at the expense of the family farmer and the taxpayer. It’s an egregious example of cronyism. Both parties are to blame, but I’m hopeful both sides can come together to set this right.”

The new House bill does contain some purported reforms. It slashes spending for conservation and nutrition, taking aim at favored liberal causes. And, with the exception of cotton farmers — “Who always get the best deal,” Mr. Faber said — it ends so-called direct payments to farmers who don’t grow anything.

Direct payments are the $4 billion to $5 billion given each year to owners of farmland that had traditionally grown various crops, including corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton and rice. These resulted in widely criticized payments to wealthy absentee “farmers” in places like Manhattan — including over $340,000 to a Rockefeller scion, Mark F. Rockefeller, The New York Post reported earlier this year — who owned land that grew nothing. Even the farm lobby backed down on that.

Yet most of the estimated $50 billion that might have been saved on direct payments over 10 years — and perhaps far more, depending on commodity prices — was plowed back into other subsidy programs. As the Cato Institute’s Sallie James put it, what the proposed bills “offer with one hand, they take with the other” for programs that “are even more likely to distort markets.”

These include increased crop insurance and increased target prices for crops that guarantee farm incomes. According to the Environmental Working Group, crop insurance subsidies already cost taxpayers $9 billion a year, and flow overwhelmingly to the wealthiest farmers and agribusinesses. While the wealthiest farmers collect over $1 million a year each in insurance subsidies, and 10,000 get over $100,000, the lowest 80 percent of policy holders collect on average just $5,000 each, according to the group.

Under so-called shallow loss provisions of both the House and Senate versions of the farm bill, the government makes direct payments to farmers to guarantee they receive 88 percent (in the Senate version) or 85 percent (in the House version) of the “target” price of various crops.