Midwest

Here are six ways the bill snubs President Trump’s February budget request.

The 1985 federal farm bill created a conservation compact between farmers and taxpayers. In return for generous farm subsidies, farmers agreed to take steps to cut erosion and polluted runoff from their most vulnerable cropland, and to not drain wetlands unless they mitigated the loss.

A new federal farm subsidy program for cotton growers could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Raccoon River in central Iowa runs through one of the most intensely farmed regions of the nation. Agriculture is vital to the area’s economy, but polluted runoff from farms poses an acute threat to residents’ tap water – and a daunting challenge to utilities struggling to keep the water clean.

Once again, Congress is attempting to provide more subsidies to cotton farmers – this time in a bill designed to provide disaster relief to Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico.

Between 2014 and 2015, three federal farm subsidy programs paid farmers multiple times for the same loss in crop yield or decline in crop price.

After a decline in crop prices in 2014 and 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture boosted farmers' income by more than $13 billion through two newly enacted subsidy programs. But during the same period, another USDA program paid out nearly as much to “compensate” the same farmers for the same decline in prices. In all, this double-dipping cost American taxpayers almost $23.9 billion.

Farming operations directly received more than $14 billion in taxpayer-funded commodity subsidies in 2015 and 2016, according to the latest analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture data obtained by Environmental Working Group.

More than 3 million acres of soybeans and other crops were damaged when a herbicide called dicamba drifted onto their fields, according to a just-published report in The Washington Post on the “arms race between ever-stronger weeds and ever-stronger weed killers.”