Senate Votes $45-Billion Boost in Farm Spending

Ending a 1996 commitment to wean farmers from federal subsidies, the Senate on Wednesday approved legislation that greatly expands farm programs while spending record amounts on land and water conservation.

The measure, approved 58 to 40, would authorize $45 billion in new spending over five years, on top of an annual $8 billion or more scheduled to go to farmers under existing law, farm groups said. By comparison, the House voted last year to add $38 billion to farm spending over five years.

Both bills would boost aid to farmers in an election year that could see control of the Senate decided by races in farm states such as South Dakota.

They would also chart a dramatically different direction than under the last major farm bill, the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act. That law aimed to phase out subsidies and expose farmers to the rigors of the free market. But a collapse in commodity prices and other factors prompted Congress to pass emergency bailouts nearly every year.

“We were a long way yet to getting to where there were no farm subsidies. But this reaffirms that the government will be in the business of assisting farmers,” said Don Lipton, spokesman for the American Farm Bureau Federation, an Illinois-based organization of farmers and ranchers.

Both the Farm Bureau and Republican leaders criticized the Senate bill, which was crafted by Democrats. Republicans said the bill was too costly and threatened to upset an agreement within Congress, supported by President Bush, to add $73.5 billion to farm spending over the next decade.

Bush said Wednesday that the Senate legislation “front-loads spending into the first five years, leaving vital programs underfunded in the years that follow.”

The Farm Bureau complained that the Senate measure would limit payments to any one farm to $275,000, compared with $460,000 in current law and $550,000 in the House measure.

It also opposed portions of a measure that environmentalists consider a major victory: a new commitment to conservation incentives to farmers.

Scott Faber, a lawyer for the group Environmental Defense, said the Senate bill would spend $4.4 billion annually on conservation, up from about $2 billion today.

“This is huge--an overwhelmingly dramatic expansion of resources that can be used to reward farmers and ranchers when they help the environment,” Faber said.

Among other things, the money would go to farmers who use cropland to restore wetlands and grassland. It also offers incentives to grow crops in ways that create animal habitats or that reduce the use of pesticides or their movement into the broader environment.

The bill would also provide $375 million over five years to seven states, including California and four other Western states, to buy or lease water rights and improve irrigation efficiency. The intent is to keep water in local rivers to help endangered fish.

Lipton, of the Farm Bureau, said farmers would not be required to sell water rights to states. But his group opposed the idea “because it really does provide a toehold for the government to interfere with water rights,” he said.

The House had provided a smaller commitment to conservation, Faber said. Details must be worked out in a conference of House and Senate negotiators.

The Senate bill would also give more assistance to grain and cotton growers and add new subsidies for commodities, including milk, honey, wool and lentils.

Senate Democrats hailed the passage of the bill.

“Farmers have already seen prices drop every single year since the current farm bill was approved,” said Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). “They’re getting roughly half of the prices they were receiving in 1996, and it will only get worse without this bill.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the bill contains several provisions of particular importance to California. Among them are stronger criminal penalties for violating plant quarantine laws, an attempt to protect crops from invasive foreign species. She said the bill also includes provisions to boost California as a grower and refiner of sugar cane.