Two great battles are being fought at once over the farm bill. | REUTERS The farm bill is back

Corn prices continue to fall even as Republicans celebrate their new “welfare queen” for abusing food stamps: a long-haired surfer-rocker from California buying lobster with his $200 monthly benefit.

The final text of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s proposed cuts from nutrition spending is due out Monday. Floor votes could come this week in what remains a closely fought battle. Fox News has jumped in, distributing scores of videos to Capitol offices of last month’s report featuring the surfer deadbeat.


Welcome back to the farm bill — or Washington’s version of “The Hunger Games.”

It will never match a government shutdown or Syria’s mayhem. But the farm bill fight is a civil war in its own right: pitting one region against another and creating its own set of refugees in a real test of the heart and soul of American agriculture.

Indeed, the great romance of farm bills has always been their capacity to touch so much of what makes up America: from farmers to food and the land itself, even the plight of the honey bee. That magic is sorely missing in the debate now, and rocked back on their heels, House and Senate Agriculture committees know they must be bolder if a bill is to be salvaged in the next few months.

Two great battles are being fought at once. The first — over the future of food stamps, retitled the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — has already fractured the old alliance between farmers and food aid.

With an eye toward the 2014 elections — and beyond — Cantor’s proposal is billed as Welfare Reform 2.0 with the goal of toughening work requirements while maintaining a core safety net for the very poor. But single mothers with preschool children are swept into the mix. Innovative training programs in states like Washington and New York could be put at risk. And the bill reinstates a flawed asset test on the poor that any farmer who has bought seed or a tractor in the past 20 years knows is hopelessly out of date.

At a sugar lobby symposium at a Napa resort, of all places, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) chose to champion the cuts last month, preaching of “certain moral hazards we’ve built into most social safety net programs” — like food stamps. This from a commodity chairman who had just voted to make the sugar program permanent law and begin a new 80 percent taxpayer-financed insurance premium subsidy for cotton. Who writes this stuff: Jonathan Swift?

But the second great farm bill battle — a farmer-on-farmer struggle over the future safety net for producers themselves — has its own dark side.

Both the House and Senate bills make real cuts in the commodity title by doing away with direct cash payments — a $4.5 billion annual subsidy begun in the mid-’90s but harder and harder to justify given farm profits. In making this change, lawmakers also confront how much the landscape has been transformed in the life of the program — especially with the remarkable rise of corn and ethanol under federal renewable fuel mandates in the past eight years.

This summer’s slide in corn prices — recent cash sales in Illinois have been almost $2.40 per bushel less than highs a year ago — add a nervous energy to this process. And getting a deal could come down to this question: what acres count: planted or base?

Direct payments are tied to the land: a historic allocation of about 260 million “base” acres among farms across the country. The average of real “planted” acres today is not so different in total. But within that universe, huge shifts have taken place, creating real winners and losers depending on what system is put in place.

To measure this, POLITICO went back and looked at Agriculture Department data for 12 Southern states and 12 from the Midwest.

For the South, 12 percent of the base acres went unplanted in a recent year compared with just 3 percent in the Midwest. In Oklahoma — home to House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas — about 15 percent, or 1.2 million, of its base acres were unplanted in 2010. Factoring in Texas, those two states alone accounted for more than 4 million unplanted base acres or 26 percent of the total for the nation that year.

In both the South and Midwest, improved commodity prices have encouraged individual farmers to plant above their base — regardless of whether they get direct payments. But the net regional gains overwhelmingly favor the Midwest, where farm income in the past decade has grown at a pace that far outstrips the South.

Among the 12 Midwest states, for example, plantings over base totaled almost 9.5 million acres in 2010 — more than double that of the South. More recent government data illustrate how this shift has accelerated since the renewable fuel standard was adopted in 2005 and expanded in 2007.

From 2006 to 2012, for example, North Dakota farmers took nearly 1 million acres out of the conservation reserve program even as corn plantings doubled in the same period. The pattern repeats itself in Kansas. Corn plantings jumped by about 800,000 acres from 2007 to 2012. In the same years, an almost equivalent 736,000 acres were pulled out of the conservation reserve.

With the pressure to cut subsidies, these regional shifts can mean even less for those who have fallen behind. There is general agreement that aid should go first to active farmers who take the risk of planting a crop. But Southerners fear the flow of dollars out of their states.

The House seeks some middle ground by paying on 85 percent of all planted acres up to a level equal to the historic base for each farm. As a practical matter, this allows for about a 17 percent increase in acreage coverage. But the cap is also a brake for Lucas on what he argues is the “artificial” impact of the renewable mandate.

Midwest Republicans, most pivotal to the Senate farm bill, want more to capture their region’s gains. A new revenue protection plan backed by corn growers to supplement crop insurance would pay up to the four-year average of planted acres for a farm, regardless of the farmer’s old base.

“They want to lock the world into this new paradigm, which only lasts as long as there is that ethanol requirement,” Lucas complained to POLITICO.

Perhaps to gain leverage, the same Midwest senators, such as GOP Sens. Pat Roberts of Kansas and John Thune of South Dakota, are dead-set against planted acres being used by the House in its favorite program: a price loss program that would be triggered when markets fall below target prices.

The senators argue that planting decisions will be distorted if the targets are too high. The soybean industry — which partners with corn and has large export markets — is especially sensitive to any risk of intervention by the World Trade Organization.

But the House formula pays on only 85 percent of acres and 90 percent of a farmer’s yield — greatly reducing the actual subsidy. By comparison, the Senate bill backs itself into what seems a poor man’s version of direct payments for rice and peanuts.

Money would go out according to base acres — not what is planted. The only real change is that the payments must be triggered by prices falling below a set level.

This infuriates the House — especially Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, the ranking Democrat on the Agriculture Committee and its chairman in 2008, when the last farm bill passed. Peterson’s home state has shared in the Midwest’s success, but he fears that the Senate is trying to capture the good times without building a safety net for the bad.

“Why are we paying money to people for something they’re not doing?” Peterson said. “The Senate has to get real.

“There are less and less of us that represent agriculture, so we have to have a way to explain to the other folks what we’re doing here that makes sense,” Peterson told POLITICO. “You cannot explain to them why we would give somebody money based on what they did in 1985.”

The focus, he said, should be on establishing some floor for farmers “if things go to hell.”

“That I can sell to people,” Peterson said. “I’ve tried it on a bunch of urban members, and they say that makes sense.”

Any compromise rests ultimately on the total dollars available. President Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate will never buy the level of SNAP cuts proposed by Cantor. But the House cuts inevitably increase the pressure on negotiators to find alternative savings, perhaps from crop insurance subsidies.

Cotton could yet be pivotal given its Southern ties and political power.

It is one of the most veteran and skilled of the commodity lobbies and broke early — ahead of rice and peanuts — to make its deal in the Senate with Midwest Republicans. Cotton jumped in early, too, with Cantor in July, helping the Virginia Republican narrowly pass a pared-back House bill stripped of its nutrition title.

But to get a bill to the White House will require more. The farm bill here is like any crop: How do you get it out of the field?

This article tagged under: Farm Bill