So what’s the holdup? Now that both the Senate and House Agriculture committees have passed their versions of the bill, you’d think they’d get to work hashing it out, right? Wrong. Instead the Republican-controlled House is stalling.As Politico reports:

Never before in modern times has a farm bill reported from the House Agriculture Committee been so blocked. POLITICO looked back at 50 years of farm bills and found nothing like this. There have been long debates, often torturous negotiations … but no House farm bill, once out of committee, has been kept off the floor while its deadline passes.

As we’ve been reporting, neither farm bill reflects the goals of sustainable food advocates (in fact most in the good food movement think the bills stink and haven’t been afraid to say so). Both would continue to heavily subsidize industrial-scale commodity farming, cut funding to conservation, and short-shrift poor folks, just to varying degrees (the House draft is currently much worse on the latter). But the chaos that could descend if a bill does not get passed at all this year may be even worse than the House bill.

According to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), it’s looking very likely that Congress won’t address the bill until it returns in September. By that point, “action on a short-term extension will likely take all of the short number of legislative days available in September, and may spill over into early October.” If they can pull an extension to the current, i.e. 2008, Farm Bill together, NSAC adds, “the working assumption is that then the leadership of the two committees will attempt to work out a final version of the farm bill in closed-door negotiations.” If they can come to a consensus (an image that’s become awfully difficult to conjure these days), “they would then attempt to attach the melded product onto one of several ‘must pass’ bills during the lame duck session of Congress in November and December.”

A number of officials have done their best to put pressure on House leaders to get the darn thing off the ground. Nancy Pelosi is calling on the House, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has made a handful of speeches urging Congress to get moving, and then, just this Friday, 82 members of the House sent a letter [PDF] to House leaders (namely John Boehner, who apparently “hates the farm bill”) urging them to send it to the floor for debate.

The drought in the Midwest is also turning up the heat on the process, as roughly a third of the counties in the nation have now been designated disaster areas. Of course, most of the corn and soybean growers we’re hearing about in the news already have federally subsidized crop insurance, but Vilsack has announced that he hopes the bill reinstates additional disaster funding. And while it’s unclear whether the farm bill would really do much of anything to help small farmers and specialty crop farmers — i.e. the ones with the most to lose and the smallest safety nets — there is some emergency assistance for livestock farmers in the 2012 draft bills.

I’m with the folks at NSAC, who seem to believe that getting this farm bill — or almost any farm bill at this point — passed seems to be the lesser short-term evil. And at least some members of the House seem to be leaning in that direction as well, such as House Agriculture Committee Chair Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) who told Politico: “If this drought continues in the West and Midwest, it could drive members to want to see some action.”

Of course, I say the above with a huge caveat, because it’s also our job here at Grist to think beyond this year’s legislative battles. After all, the drought is impacting agriculture much more intensely than it might were we not growing huge swaths of industrial monocrops in the first place. And, as Tom Laskawy wrote last week, the system of commodity agriculture the 2008 and 2012 farm bills props up doesn’t even begin to allow farmers to prevent or adapt to future droughts. “The weather patterns which gave rise to the Corn (and Soy) Belt of the Midwest have permanently changed. And farming needs to change with them,” he wrote.

The current confluence of circumstances is forcing decision makers to weigh short-term solution against big, long-term consequences, such as: Do we allow farmers to sell hay grown on fragile, swiftly disappearing conservation land to those with nothing to feed their livestock?

Ideally, of course, our lawmakers would be moving quickly not just to pass this bill but to build a food system that is resilient, biologically diverse, supportive of small producers, and based on rich, greenhouse gas-absorbing soil — one where we don’t have to choose between growing food and protecting our environment. That has yet to happen, but we can — in the meantime — build a food movement that is big and flexible enough to allow room for both: A call to short-term action and a vision for long-term change.

Update: On Thursday, July 26, NSAC reported that a one-year extension was looking likely. They wrote: “the House Republican leadership decided this week to use the drought as a cover story for extending the current farm bill for a year rather than passing a new farm bill with substantial reforms.”

The last time Congress passed a farm bill was 2008. Not exactly a triumph of thoughtful politics, it was loaded with subsidies and carve-outs. (This year’s farm bill, now moving through Congress, has been pulled between between removing  and worsening those giveaways.)

There’s a reason why that 2008 bill heavily favored the status quo: the status quo invested heavily in that outcome. A new report from Food and Water Watch outlines exactly how much was spent and by whom to lobby for the final bill.

Click to embiggen.

The 2008 Farm Bill lobbying campaign ranked among the most well-financed legislative fights of the past decade. More than 1,000 companies, trade associations and other groups spent an estimated $173.5 million lobbying on just the 2008 Farm Bill, according to a Food & Water Watch analysis of data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics. (See Table 1.) During every day that the 100th Congress was in session in 2007 and 2008, special interests spent an average of $539,000 lobbying on issues covered by the Farm Bill. …

Agribusiness, commodity trade associations, food manufacturers and other interests all pushed to get a big slice of the Farm Bill pie. The $173.5 million lobbying frenzy ranked alongside the Center for Public Integrity’s $120 million estimate for health care reform lobbying and the Center for Responsive Politics’ $250 million estimate for lobbying on the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

The table above right outlines how lobbying money broke down by issue area. It’s particularly interesting to note that energy was the second-largest issue area on which members of Congress were lobbied. Food and Water Watch also broke out the issues that comprised energy lobbying, as below.

Click to embiggen.

What’s most remarkable about this is that the battle wasn’t between biodiesel and ethanol; rather, it was between the players that were already established: ethanol and fossil fuels.

The 2012 (or 2013? 2014?) farm bill will be just as influenced by lobbyists, if not more so. To date, for the 2011-2012 congressional session, agribusiness interests have spent $124 million on lobbying — not all of it on the farm bill, mind you, but certainly a large amount. (They’ve also spent $32 million supporting congressional campaigns, including $9 million on candidates challenging sitting members.)

Today, we look at the figures from 2008 with shock. $539,000 a day? In the future, we’ll undoubtedly consider the amount quaint.

No, the members of the committee also felt the need to sneak something in to help out those poor struggling biotechnology behemoths in their attempts to win approval for new genetically engineered seed. Since we all know genetically modified seeds never win approval. I’m sorry. Did I say never? I meant always.

But apparently an unending winning streak isn’t enough for the biotech industry. It wants to make sure that the U.S. Department of Agriculture approves its new seeds with minimal study, and loses the ability to withdraw them from the market should they prove harmful. To top it off, biotech companies want to ensure that anyone harmed by these seeds will have no recourse for damages.*

Such a provision was slipped into the farm bill at the last minute. It would eliminate the liability biotech companies may have and effectively lift all regulations on genetically modified seeds. The provision bears a strong similarity to one that was added to the annual agriculture spending bill now working its way through the House (the one activist group Food Democracy Now! has dubbed the Monsanto Protection Act).

Of course, not all industry groups are thrilled. The National Grain and Feed Association, which has an interest in protecting the interests of its members who don’t use GMO seeds, has come out against it. As Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Most of agribusiness was just as surprised as [GMO opponents] that Lucas and Peterson would choose to use the farm bill to gut USDA review of GMO crops and open this particular Pandora’s Box.”

As predicted, the newly approved House bill is awful otherwise. As the Environmental Working Group put it, “The House bill would feed fewer people, help fewer farmers, do less to promote healthy diets and weaken environmental protections — and it would cost far more than Congressional bean counters say.” So the Senate may also have bigger fish to fry when it comes time for both sides of Congress to battle it out.

Before this biotech language can become law, it would need to be added to the Senate version of the farm bill, which lacks any such GMO provision. What the leaders of the House Ag Committee might be banking on is that, with so many differences between the House and Senate bills, any objections to a provision such as this could get drowned out in the race to final passage. With time running out and the current farm bill set to expire on Sept. 30 (and with it many of the programs that make up federal farm policy), perhaps an itty bitty provision like GMO deregulation might get ignored by House and Senate negotiators.

All that said, the whole farm bill mishegas may be for naught — GMO handouts included. The Hill reports that House Speaker John Boehner is still refusing to commit to bringing the bill up for a vote. And in another article, The Hill recounts Boehner’s longstanding antipathy to farm subsidies — “he hates the farm bill,” says one lobbyist — so the odds of getting this bill into law are long indeed.

But given the attempts to include GMO deregulation in every recent piece of agriculture-related legislation, even total farm bill Armageddon probably won’t be enough to stop biotech’s friends in Congress. I’m guessing it’s a question of when, not if, a giveaway provision to the biotech industry like this one becomes law.

*And for those of you who doubt that GMOs produce harm — it’s worth noting that Bayer was forced to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to farmers whose crops were contaminated by its GMO rice.

Things are looking bleak for corn farmers in the Midwest. Drought conditions and above-average temperatures are likely to continue for some time and now even soybeans — corn’s sister commodity — are succumbing to the weather. The economic implications for the entire Midwest — and not just farmers — are dire.

Not that this is entirely unexpected. Experts have been warning commodity farmers for years that a changing climate will lead to exactly these kinds of devastating conditions in the nation’s heartland.

And, yes, I agree with David Roberts, who says it’s time to dispense with “climate disclaimers,” i.e. the “well, gee, we don’t really know” qualifications about the relationship between climate change and these kinds of weather events. After all, as Grist reported recently, the government’s National Climatic Data Center calculated that if the climate weren’t warming, we wouldn’t expect to see another period as hot as the last 13 months have been until the year 124,652. Does anyone really believe that we’re experiencing “100,000-year” warmth? Me neither.

There’s also the effect the heat and drought are having on food prices; Bloomberg Businessweek reports that prices on grocery store shelves are already on the rise:

In May, retail prices of boneless hams, ground beef and cheese in the U.S. were close to all-time highs set earlier this year, while chicken breast jumped more than 12 percent during the first five months of the year, government data show.

“When people look at rising prices for hamburger, butter, eggs and other protein sources from higher corn costs, that’s when more money ends up in the food basket,” said Minneapolis- based Michael Swanson, a senior agricultural economist at Wells Fargo & Co., the biggest U.S. farm lender. “We were hoping for a break, and we aren’t going to get it.”

But it’s also worth considering what’s going on in the Midwest in light of today’s markup of the House Agriculture Committee’s draft of the new farm bill. [Update: The House Agriculture Committee approved the bill on July 12. There is still no date set for a vote by the full House.] While I reported on the outrageous cuts to food stamps in the House version last week, I didn’t get a chance to review the equally outrageous, effectively unrestricted expansion of crop insurance included in the bill. As the Environmental Working Group summed it up, the committee draft “would give unlimited taxpayer dollars to farmers who are already making record profits and less support to hungry kids who depend on federal assistance for food.”

As it is, the payouts to farmers for the likely crop losses will be enormous. In fact, claims are already starting to roll in. In commodity crop states like Iowa, upwards of 90 percent of the corn and soy crops are covered by insurance — with an additional federal agricultural disaster relief program backstopping the big losses from these kinds of weather events.

On the one hand, you could argue that this kind of thing is exactly what these programs were designed to do — protect farmers from natural disasters. But as climate scientists are (finally) loudly proclaiming, the climate future is now. Or, as an atmospheric scientist put it to the Associated Press in reference to this summer’s extreme weather, “This is what global warming looks like.”

In other words, the only groups acting like this weather is a fluke are the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), insurance companies, and the owners of big farms. Because even after this year’s losses and the attendant spike in grain prices (in fact, they’re already spiking), the system is designed to encourage farmers to plant as much or more of the same crops next year as they did this year, which already saw the largest planted acreage in over a half century. And thus are we set up for a repeat experience, whether it’s next year, the year after, or a few years down the road.

Tom Philpott at Mother Jones observed that for all Big Ag’s talk of technological solutions for managing extreme weather, research [PDF] shows that the most promising strategies come from organic practices, which focus on building soil health and resiliency.

As Philpott said, “a climate-ready agriculture system will not likely arrive gift-wrapped in the form of a silver-bullet technology from the ag-biotech industry,” but will come to pass because farmers finally turn their backs on the chemically intensive monocropping practices of modern industrial agriculture.

Skeptics can roll their eyes until they fall out of their heads. But it’s impossible to look at the parched fields of Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio with their drought-induced (two-feet-deep!) crevasses, watch the seemingly annual mega-heat waves roll across the plains, and maintain that it’s a good idea to pay out billions of dollars worth of insurance policies just so that farmers can try again next year.

Yet that’s exactly what the new farm bill will encourage commodity farmers to do. It’s understandable that individual farmers would want to chalk this up to a bad year and hope for better weather. But the USDA needs to recognize that the weather patterns which gave rise to the Corn (and Soy) Belt of the Midwest have permanently changed. And farming needs to change with them.

Persistent drought isn’t here to stay in the Midwest (though that is the future for the southwestern U.S. circa 2050) but extreme weather probably is. And it’s awfully hard to move agriculture in the right direction when the USDA — with the enthusiastic endorsement of farm-state representatives in the House and Senate — wants to throw billions upon billions of dollars at farmers to stay a failing course.

Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. Congress has plenty of options for saving money, it’s just easier to reduce the deficit on the backs of poor people. The Environmental Working Group summed it up succinctly: “the bill would give unlimited taxpayer dollars to farmers who are already enjoying record profits and less support to hungry kids who depend on federal assistance.”

While many groups (and politicians) are organizing to try and stop the bleeding, they are missing several key talking points and strategies that could help save the program. Here are just three ideas, which stem from the recommendations in my recent report, Food Stamps, Follow the Money: Are Corporations Profiting from Hungry Americans? As a bonus, each offers a bi-partisan approach to increasing accountability in what has become a massive government program vulnerable to criticism.

1. Increase transparency. Currently, we know very little about where more than $70 billion a year in taxpayer money is going. The federal government does not require collection of data on how much SNAP money is spent, for example, on soda versus milk, or cookies versus carrots. As I learned from the media coverage of my report, this is a huge concern of folks across the political spectrum. (See for example, this article in the conservative Washington Times.) While some advocates fear that making such data public will only lead to more criticism, the current policy of secrecy is not doing the program much good either. (See Raj Patel’s post, “We Know More About Who Makes Our Bombs than Who Feeds Our Kids.”) Moreover, we need such data to properly evaluate the program, make improvements, and ferret out all the alleged “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

2.  Allow states to experiment. It’s abundantly clear that many Americans (also regardless of political affiliation) are unhappy with current policy that allows SNAP participants to purchase junk food. See for example, the comments on this San Francisco Chronicle cover story. (While it’s painful to read some of the harsher comments, we cannot ignore this backlash.) One way to fix this problem is for the feds to let states with worthy proposals evaluate different approaches to SNAP purchase policy, such as not allowing soft drinks and other unhealthy products. Given that nine states have attempted to pass bills to try to improve SNAP, (all failed thanks to a combined lobbying effort by the food industry and anti-hunger groups, which also stopped New York City’s high-profile attempt) why not give the idea a chance?

3.  Starve banks, not children. As my research found, large banks and other financial institutions play a middleman role in SNAP by contracting with states to administer funds via EBT (electronic benefits transfer) and approve retail transactions. For example, JPMorgan Chase currently has contracts in half the states, to the tune of hundred of millions of dollars. (Again, there is no national accounting so the exact figure is unknown.) These funds are paid for by both federal and state taxpayer dollars. So how about it, Congress, before taking food out of hungry children’s mouths, maybe you could ask JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon if he wouldn’t mind shaving a little off of his profits instead?

Last December, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) proposed the FRESH Act, which would have accomplished (among other policies) numbers one and two above. Perhaps during the bill mark-up and floor debate, some brave House member will bring those ideas back into the conversation. Increasing transparency and making improvements to SNAP can only strengthen the program and maybe even reduce the cruelest cuts. It’s worth a shot.

When the Senate passed its version of the farm bill, we at Grist had to admit that, for all the flaws, it “wasn’t all bad news.” Some of the worst aspects of the bill (like giveaways to the insurance industry and to big commodity farmers) were reined in by several late-breaking amendments, and federal nutrition programs (“food stamps”) were “only” cut by $4.5 billion over the next 10 years. That may not sound so great, but it’s all relative; farm bill analysts have been warning for months that the House version would be much worse.

In fact, later today, we’ll find out for sure just how much worse it can get. The House Agriculture Committee is scheduled to release its draft of the farm bill tonight — and according to Politico’s David Rogers, the House GOP has indeed forced far deeper (you might even say extreme) cuts to food stamps as the price for passage. According to Rogers’ sources, the House version of the farm bill will cut $16.5 billion over 10 years from food stamps alone.

(Update: Shortly after we published this post, the House released its draft. And that number was right.)

In a deep dive into the backroom fight over food stamps among House Republicans, Rogers reports that they have selected a set of “reforms” that will radically reduce the number of people eligible for the program. Close to 2 million people will be dropped from the food stamp program, Rogers estimates, if the House version becomes law. It doesn’t seem to matter to Republicans that these changes would also have to get through the Senate during the reconciliation process, which has rejected similar provisions in the past.

Distressingly, these are cuts that Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee seem willing to swallow. At a recent news conference, Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.), ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, admitted that the committee is expected to approve its version by voice vote next week and send it on to the full House for final passage — though he acknowledged that the draft will probably “make Democrats angry.”

“Angry” is probably an understatement. I would argue that the cuts to food stamps will be a non-starter for numerous House Democrats — many of whose votes will be needed to pass the bill, probably ending hopes for a new farm bill before the election. Yet it’s also possible that this process has simply devolved into empty pre-election posturing.

Evidence for this theory lies in the fact that the House leadership hasn’t even scheduled time to bring the farm bill up for a final vote. Politico’s Rogers speculated that House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (who bears a good part of the responsibility for setting the House schedule) never really believed the Senate would pass anything. Now he just wants the whole thing to go away.

With no guarantee of a floor vote on the House calendar, the prospect of an extension of the current bill (which expires in September) looms larger. But as Ferd Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition explains in the organization’s blog, there’s nothing simple about that either:

If we are headed to an extension of current law, here too there are at least three possible options. There could be a short term, 3-month extension, with the hope that Congress, during the “lame duck” session after the November elections could somehow find a way to finish the bill — even if the House version has never gone to the floor for debate (more on that option below).  There could also be a one-year extension, with both House and Senate starting the process all over again in the new two-year Congress starting in 2013.  Or there could be a one-year extension that could be superseded if a lame duck option materializes.

Substantively, there are also two options for an extension bill. One would be a clean extension, with no changes to current law during the time of the extension. The other, and perhaps more likely, would be an extension with a limited number of changes to current law, either to deal with several immediate problems that a simple extension would not address or to make a down payment on deficit reduction, or perhaps a combination of both.

And if the extension fails? Next stop, 1949.

We know the House GOP is happy to play chicken with the Senate as they just did with the federal transportation funding bill. In that fight, Senate Democrats showed a willingness to give up on many of their own priorities for the sake of getting a law passed that would keep federal funds flowing.

Further complicating matters, the House GOP has also made noise about demanding more cuts from commodity programs as well — a non-starter with Big Ag — though we’ll have to wait and see if those come to pass. Either way, Republicans have once again shown a willingness to take things to the brink. The question now is will they grab as many Democrats as they can and jump.

At the moment, the farm bill process is a Choose Your Own Adventure book full of tragic endings (and a slim chance of one or two reasonable ones). Hoefner couches the prospects for getting a new farm bill to the president’s desk about as hopefully as one can: “It’s a tall order, but not impossible.”

Indeed, I’m reminded of a comment Michael Pollan made during a visit to the Grist offices for a potluck lunch several years ago. At the time one of his ideas for improving food policy was to reform the House Agriculture Committee. As he put it, that committee is “where decent ag legislation goes to die.”

Of course, Pollan’s comment came before John Boehner and his Band of Merry Tea Partiers took control of the House in 2010. If the House Agriculture Committee of 2009 was where decent legislation went to die, then the current committee is where its corpse is trampled on, disemboweled, and paraded through the streets.

This year, in addition to the usual underfunding of legislation that could make the food system more sustainable, the appropriations process has become especially charged, thanks to a one-paragraph addition called the “farmer assurance provision.” The provision — which the agriculture committee approved last week, but has yet to go to the full House — would allow farmers to plant and grow GMO crops before they’ve been deemed safe. Or, more accurately, if it passes, farmers will be able to plant these crops while legal battles ensue over their safety.

Groups ranging from the Center for Food Safety and the National Family Farm Coalition to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists are all opposing the provision. Food Democracy Now!, an online grassroots community, is calling it the “Monsanto Protection Act” and has collected over 300,000 signatures opposing the provision.

As it stands now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) can suspend planting while the environmental impact of one of these crops is being assessed. Or that’s how it’s been in theory at least.

And it is what happened in 2007 when a federal judge overturned the USDA’s approval of GMO alfalfa, in response to a lawsuit filed by farmers and the Center for Food Safety. (Planting of alfalfa resumed again in 2011 when the USDA fully deregulated the crop.)

In the case of GMO sugar beets, another hotly contested crop, planting was supposed to be suspended, but by the point that suspension was ordered, the market had been cleared out and there were no longer enough non-GMO seeds. As we reported recently, “America faced the prospect of a 20-percent reduction in that year’s sugar crop. In response — and in defiance of the federal judge’s order — the USDA allowed farmers to plant GM sugar beets anyway.” Now, all this back and forth could be moot to most farmers (unless a crop is officially, finally deemed unsafe — and well, that hasn’t happened yet.)

Needless to say, producers of big commodity crops are excited at the prospect. As Businessweek reports:

The American Soybean Association, one of nine U.S. agriculture groups supporting the House provision, said the legislation would give farmers assurance they can plant and harvest modified crops during legal challenges.

The Center for Food Safety, which has sued over USDA approvals of biotech crops, called the bill’s language a “Monsanto profit assurance provision” that interferes with judicial oversight of agency decisions and has the potential to disrupt the global grain trade.

It only makes sense that the soybean industry would be glad to see these “legal challenges” disappear, since a whopping 94 percent of soybeans planted in this country are now genetically engineered to be herbicide resistant.

The sad fact is, the USDA’s oversight over the biotech industry has been eroding slowly for a while. If this provision makes it through the full House vote, the agency will have just about lost the reins completely.

The farm bill passed the Senate! The farm bill passed the Senate!

We don’t get to say this very often, so forgive our enthusiasm. The bill is a massive piece of legislation passed by Congress every five years (or so), so we get excited about it while we can. An expenditure of about $100 billion a year, it touches nearly every part of our food system. Food stamps? Farm bill. Subsidies to the sugar industry? Farm bill. Insurance for failed crops? Farm bill.

Or, at least, those things all were in the bill. The version that passed the Senate today nearly 2-to-1 is a mixed bag — with a few bright spots. It leaves sugar subsidies in place, while revamping assistance to farmers in a way that benefits Big Ag. Food stamps (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) took a hit, but it could have been worse.

Okay, it will probably get worse. When the House considers what to include in the legislation (a process that is still a few weeks away), it’s highly unlikely that the balance of cuts will be the same, and SNAP will probably bear the brunt.

Last week, we presented a list of five amendments worth keeping an eye on. Here’s how they fared.

1. Restoring funding to SNAP. As mentioned above, the final version of the bill passed by the Senate includes funding for the SNAP program. We were keeping an eye on an amendment from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.); that amendment failed. As also mentioned above, funding for the program will almost certainly not survive the House unless some sort of deal is reached. (The Atlantic has a good overview of the political battle over SNAP.)

2 and 3. Limiting subsidies to crop insurance. The final version of the bill limits crop subsidies to the wealthiest farmers, in part thanks to the amendment from Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) which passed 66-33. You can learn far more about that amendment here.

4. Banning ownership of livestock by meatpackers. Unfortunately, this amendment wasn’t part of the final vote and, as such, isn’t part of the final bill. (Here’s more background on the issue.)

5. Growing a new generation of farmers. More good news: The amendment from Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to provide funding for the next generation of farmers was included in the final bill.

The amendments we were keeping an eye on weren’t the only important measures under consideration. A measure from Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) that would have eliminated the “Organic Certification Cost Share program” was defeated, which is good news. If passed, it would have been a big blow to organic farmers. A proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have allowed states to implement labeling systems for genetically modified crops was also defeated.

The response from progressives and food advocates has been sober — but not anguished. The Environmental Working Group issued a statement that read, in part:

When conservationists stood our ground and fought, we won against the supposedly invincible crop insurance industry. Too many in the conservation community didn’t fight at all against massive spending cuts to conservation programs that have already been hit by massive reductions in recent years. As a consequence, conservation funding took the largest proportionate hit in this bill. For the “food movement”, the Senate farm bill has been another, rather sobering reminder that until we develop political muscle to match our passion for a sustainable food system, we’ll continue to see billions of dollars misspent on industrial agriculture.

If you’re a fan of anguish, don’t worry. When this thing gets to the House, we’ll very likely have far less good news.

There isn’t enough time to consider all these amendments, so farm-state senators have worked furiously to pull off a deal involving votes on a package of amendments followed by a vote on the complete bill. It will all culminate today, in what’s called a vote-o-rama: votes on 73 amendments in quick succession. (Here’s the guide to amendments to watch we published last week on Grist — although several of the most reform-minded did not make the cut, nor did the amendment to ban battery cages in egg production. The GMO labeling amendment led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will get a vote, however.) While this process will only get the bill through the Senate (the House is another story completely), it looks like it’s the best hope we have this year.

As important as it is for the Senate bill to move forward (the current farm bill expires in September), there are still some deeply troubling aspects to the legislation. As we’ve been reporting on for the last six months or so here at Grist, the expansion of crop insurance as a subsidy for large-scale farmers is a particular concern to many critics because it involves both a premium subsidy for farmers and a government guarantee to backstop losses for the insurance companies.

This dual subsidy makes it a steal for the insurance industry. In fact, as agricultural economist and crop insurance critic Bruce Babcock observes in this piece on MSNBC by the Food & Environment Reporting Network (full disclosure: I’m the organization’s executive director), the program “as currently designed has ‘zero benefit’ to the public.”

Babcock estimates that “for every $2 the government spends on crop insurance, $1 goes to the insurance industry.” The amount of federal dollars flowing to the insurance system led another economist, Vincent Smith of Montana State University, to declare that “the agriculture and insurance industries are stunningly overcompensated.”

Since the crop insurance system isn’t capped in any way, the government is virtually guaranteeing that large commodity farmers won’t lose money, no matter how much they plant. It’s such a sure bet that even Wall Street is paying attention. As the Financial Times [Sub req] reports:

Institutional money managers have emerged as unlikely beneficiaries of a subsidized safety net for U.S. farmers set for expansion by Washington.

… “The fact of the matter is that you can insure your crop at a level which means your farmer isn’t going bankrupt. I’ve got a government-backed counterparty,” said Hunt Stookey, head of farmland investment at AEW, which manages $47.5 billion in real estate. “I can’t have that bad a year.”

… Big asset managers such as AEW and GMO have joined TIAA-CREF, UBS and Hancock Agricultural Investment Group in the farmland investment niche. Institutional investors still own only 1-2 percent of U.S. crop land and are barred from land purchases in some states.

Crop insurance is “just one of many factors that we consider,” said Jose Minaya, head of natural resources and infrastructure investments at TIAA-CREF, the $487 billion money manager.

In agricultural investment circles, the importance of the heavily subsidized crop insurance program is nonetheless acknowledged.

I bet it is. An unnamed investment adviser goes on to say that he doesn’t know “of any other business where you can insure 90 percent of your P[rofit] and L[oss].”

The way these investors are talking about farmland reminds me a lot of the way they talk about big banks in the post-financial crisis era. If this farm bill passes as is, the federal government will have effectively declared large-scale commodity farms too big to fail. And Wall Street knows it.

Of course, not all senators support this crop insurance subsidy. Several have proposed amendments to cap insurance premiums as well as to place limits on payouts. There’s even a proposed amendment that would limit the crop insurance premium subsidy to only farmers making less than $750,000. That’s not a small number, but as soon as it was proposed an agricultural “risk manager” came out with suggestions for ways farmers could avoid it.

With these crop insurance “reforms,” the Senate’s farm bill would take a bad system and make it worse. And we’re told that this might be the best Congress can manage right now since the House version will likely be even more favorable to corporations. Yet the Senate’s version does a pretty good job of padding the pockets of insurance companies and big Wall Street investors on its own.

This farm bill could really do with a little more “farm” and a little less “free cash for corporations.” Hopefully, the Senate will oblige.

Though full enforcement of the battery cage ban wasn’t mandated until 2015, many producers didn’t wait to make changes. Some moved out of state. Others implemented the changes early.

A group of egg producers in this latter category have joined an unexpected crusade: a push to enact rules similar to those in Prop 2 nationally. The Los Angeles Times looked at this unexpected effort last month:

In a rare alliance, the Humane Society of the United States and egg ranchers have joined forces to lobby for federal legislation that would set national standards for egg ranches similar to those implemented at JS West [a California producer that met the Proposition 2 standards early].

“No question about it: Proposition 2 was a major wake-up call to the entire U.S. egg industry,” said Chad Gregory, senior vice president of United Egg Producers, a trade organization that represents most of the nation’s egg farmers.

That effort may come to fruition in the farm bill, omnibus agriculture legislation currently in front of the Senate (which you can learn more about here). Food Safety News reports that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has lined up a dozen senators to back an amendment to the proposed bill which would “double the space given to each of the nation’s more than 250 million egg-laying hens by phasing in enriched colony housing that allow the hens to express natural behaviors like perching and nesting.”

It’s not clear how the measure will fare on the Senate floor, particularly with over 90 proposed amendments to the farm bill under consideration. Still, proponents are optimistic.

“It’s my hope that Senators break free of the old paradigm — animal advocates versus agriculture industries — and recognize that this solution serves all parties, especially consumers,” said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of HSUS. “Failure to enact this provision will mean that the egg industry and animal advocates will go back to costly state-by-state battles that will slow down progress, cost both sides hundreds of millions of dollars, and leave all parties with uncertain outcomes.”

Pacelle had more passion when he explained his desired outcome to the Times.

The federal legislation provides a pathway to give the birds a much better life. … It’s not perfect, but it is a dramatic improvement.