IT may not surprise you to learn that much of the pork and chicken and beef and milk that you buy at the grocery store comes from huge, industrial-size operations that bear little resemblance to the quaint family farms that adorn many food packages.

But you may be surprised to learn that your tax dollars have helped pave the way for the growth of these livestock megafarms by paying farmers to deal with the mountains of excrement that their farms generate. All of this is carried out under the rubric of “conservation.” Congress is about to renew the program  and possibly even expand it  as part of a new farm bill wending its way through the Capitol.

It’s called the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, also known as EQIP  a name that suggests an initiative to encourage farmers to improve environmental standards.

And, in fact, when the program was created as part of the 1996 farm bill, that’s exactly what it was. At the time, the government agreed to pay a share  up to 75 percent  of a conservation project, and the payments were limited to $10,000 a year. Farmers used the money for small-scale projects that had environmental benefits, like planting cover crops to prevent erosion and soak up excess nitrogen or installing fencing to better manage grazing cattle.