Editorial: Senate: Pass a farm bill to reward innovation

President Bush has threatened to veto a bloated $286 billion farm bill the House passed in July. He needs to stand firm, and the Senate needs to take it seriously.

Kowtowing to lawmakers from the Midwest and South, Speaker Nancy Pelosi allowed commodity industries to write major sections of the House farm bill. As a result, the bill avoids real reform and does little to reduce wasteful subsidies that go to growers of corn, wheat, cotton, sugar and rice.

These subsidies -- more than $90 billion over the last decade for corn, wheat and cotton -- turn potentially innovative farmers into automatons, growing the same crops, year after year. They fill up our grocery stores with subsidized corn-syrupy products that add to the nation's obesity crisis. They hurt farmers in developing countries who are unable to compete with subsidized U.S. growers. And they use up funds that could be earmarked for other purposes, such as helping farmers conserve wetlands or produce noncorn crops for cellulosic ethanol.

Many farmers know the farm bill is an embarrassing legacy. In a revealing package of stories last Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed Philip Bowles, part of a San Francisco-based family that has inherited the vast ranchlands of cattle baron Henry Miller. Over the years, Bowles and his family have received millions of dollars in subsidies for growing cotton near Los Banos. Bowles acknowledges these payments are a "welfare program," but the family continues to accept commodity payments anyway. If they didn't, he says they couldn't compete with cotton farmers in the South, who also take the payments.

"If farmers didn't get the subsidy, they wouldn't grow it," Bowles says of his competitors. A level playing field, he says, would force him and other farmers to innovate, possibly by growing something other than cotton.

The Senate now has a chance to institute reforms Pelosi was unwilling to support, mainly out of parochial concerns of protecting freshman Democrats. One reform, supported by the president, would cut off commodity subsidies to farmers making incomes of $200,000 or more. It would save about $1.45 billion over 10 years. The House set only a $1 million ceiling on payments to individual farmers and loosened other limits on commodity payments. Net result: More money for millionaires.

The focus now turns to the Senate. In the past, California's Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have endorsed reforms, while remaining supportive of continued subsidies for cotton and rice growers. They can't have it both ways. California interests are now pressing them to support extra funding for "specialty crops" (fruit and vegetable growers) and conservation efforts such as the Grasslands Reserve Program. The latter would discourage ranchers from selling off and subdividing their land (including those in foothills around Sacramento).

Although California rightly sees itself as slighted by past farm bills, the response shouldn't be simply to lard up the current one, while leaving the subsidy programs largely untouched. Feinstein and Boxer need to become voices for real reform, which means making tough decisions about subsidies, and working to phase them out. Any other posture doesn't encourage innovation. It's a blank check for automaton agriculture.