The Iowa caucuses are more than a year away but potential 2012 presidential hopefuls are already parachuting into corn country to pander to Big Ag. Perennially coy Newt Gingrich is only the latest to genuflect before Iowa’s long reigning monarch – King Corn. Delivering the keynote address at the Renewable Fuels Association summit (Jan. 25), the former Republican Speaker of the House (Speaker’s Bureau fee listed at $40,000+) and tax cutting champion called for continued mandates and support for the 30-year old corn ethanol industry.

Here’s who lost out today (Jan. 21) when the Environmental Protection Agency decided to allow the use of fuel containing up to 15 percent ethanol (E15) in any gas-powered car or truck built since 2001:

• Car owners whose engines and catalytic converters may be damaged even as auto makers void their warranties.
• Owners of lawnmowers, outboard motors, chain saws, ATVs and a host of other outdoor tools whose engines will break down if they’re fueled with E15.
• The environment, as this misguided policy encourages all-out corn production and the massive water pollution that results, ultimately reinforcing the devastating “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay.
• Birds and other wildlife, which will lose habitat as large-scale farmers expand into marginal and highly erodible land.

Food and agriculture policy always comes down to money: how federal dollars will be prioritized and spent.

Indications are that the wasteful corn ethanol tax credit may be included in a legislative deal negotiated by the Obama White House to extend tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush. Last week the Environmental Working Group published a top ten list of reasons why Congress should allow the ethanol tax credit to expire at the end of the year.

Rumors are flying that the lame duck Congress will attach an extension of the so-called ethanol “blender’s tax credit” to a bill to extend the Bush-era income tax cuts as part of a broader deal. Here are the Top 10 reasons – based on previously released EWG research – why Congress should say no to the tax credit extension.

DTN Progressive Farmer political correspondent Jerry Hagstrom is reporting that black farmers' claims against the US Department of Agriculture  "could be settled today if the House, as expected, takes up a $4.5 billion bill the Senate passed just before Thanksgiving to settle the Pigford II black farmers’ discrimination case against USDA."

The cut-spending, small government posse that rode the Tea Party wave into Congress -- but just happens to cash in on federal farm subsidies -- is now using national defense as a shield for  its contradictory stance. Vicky Hartzler, recently elected to Congress from Missouri and recipient of $774,000 in farm subsidies since 1995, played the national defense card when confronted over her haul of taxpayer dollars: "Everything should be on the table," she says. While she says some agriculture programs represent a "national defense issue" because they help guarantee that "we have a safety net to make sure we have food security in our country."

Everyone agrees: Chesapeake Bay is heavily polluted. Thirty years of promises, compromises, plans, schemes and a whole lot of taxpayer dollars have done little to clean up one of America's most storied watersheds. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and waste from urban sprawl is one factor. But the biggest threat to water quality in the Chesapeake is pollution from agriculture.

Just two years ago, Democratic political strategists defended passage of a status-quo farm subsidy bill by claiming it was essential to the survival of freshmen members from farm districts and to the party’s continued control of the House.