The one-year extension of the farm bill likely to come up on the House floor this week would perpetuate funding for the worst aspects of American farm policy and would cut funding for the best.

Last fall, House and Senate Agriculture Committee leaders tried to insert a “secret farm bill” in the super committee’s un-amendable deficit reduction package. They failed. Now some of those same leaders are trying to evade a floor vote by the full House by extending the current law for a year, as a pretense to negotiate a five-year farm bill with the Senate, which has already passed its version of the $1 trillion bill.

Although the future of the farm bill remains unclear, the leadership of the House of Representatives effectively rejected a proposal by the House Agriculture Committee that would have cut nutrition assistance and environmental programs to help finance lavish new subsidies for the largest farm businesses.

As the Des Moines Register reports Iowa State University economics professor Bruce Babcock appeared on the show to talk about the Midwest’s historic drought, but the conversation turned to crop insurance.

More than 60 leading chefs, authors, food and agriculture policy and nutrition experts, business leaders and environment and health organizations have sent an open letter to Capitol Hill objecting that the House agriculture committee’s proposed farm bill would “steer the next five years of national food and farm policy in the wrong direction.”

The Alliance for Food and Farming, an agribusiness group representing the bulk of conventional produce growers in California - and seemingly the only organization in existence that doesn’t want people to have information about which fruits and veggies come with multiple pesticides - sent me a list of questions after the release of Environmental Working Group’s 2012 Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce.

Some members of Congress appear eager to jam through a costly drought disaster relief program with a flawed farm bill. In an AgMag post entitled “Bad Ideas Spring from Drought,” Environmental Working Group’s Scott Faber points out that Congress has already provided farmers with a gold-plated disaster program called crop insurance - and it will pay farmers indemnities regardless of whether Congress passes a farm bill.

The drought hammering farmers and communities across the Corn Belt is being used by some as an excuse to send “the worst farm bill in recent memory” to the floor of the House of Representatives. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio.) addressed those calls today, saying (mp3): “Well there’s no question that there’s a real threat throughout the Midwest because of the dry conditions. Most farmers in my district avail themselves of crop insurance. That’s why it is in the farm bill, that’s why our government subsidizes the cost of crop insurance, to encourage farmers to buy that. In most cases it should be sufficient to deal with this problem.”

Today at the National Press Club, Environmental Working Group and a wide array of public interest organizations, including anti-hunger, public health, labor and animal welfare advocates – took part in a widely covered press conference to highlight the damaging and alarming provisions of the farm bill approved by the House Agriculture Committee.