The mammoth Farm Bill that was just overwhelmingly passed by Congress withstood a presidential veto last week and is on its way to subsidizing food and nutrition programs, and agricultural production in the United States for the next five years. It sounds pretty straightforward but anything that takes 673 pages is anything but that. This bill brings home the bacon, and just about everything in it can be eventually justified as having to do with commodities, which is another word often used for basic resources produced from the earth. Like food.

 

 

As the Independent’s Gwyneth Doland described, a significant portion of the Bill funds food programs to take care of the nutrition needs of poor people, plus traditional agricultural industries like dairy farming, sort of.

 

But there are also some odd inclusions, like the tax breaks for owners of thoroughbred racehorses. Turns out horses are Kentucky’s largest agricultural product and the horse racing industry needs some public assistance.

 

Less obvious would be the protection of the red-cockaded woodpecker. But as it turns out, the Farm Bill promotes a wide-variety of conservation measures. So, ok.

 

Energy market regulation? Well, oil and gas are commodities produced from the earth, just like agricultural products. And in fact, the Bill addresses energy extensively. Plus, it expands regulation of commodities futures trading. Why not tack on an amendment to fix the lack of regulation of futures trading on electronic energy markets, which many people say is contributing to sky-rocketing fuel prices? In fact, the bill closed the highly-debated "Enron loophole" that so many reference as one of the reasons oil prices are skyrocketing. The Enron Loophole was put into place in 2000, essentially eliminating the regulation of energy futures trading in electronic markets.



The Farm Bill isn’t really the Farm Bill afterall. It’s actually the "Food, Conservation and Energy Act of 2008," and in that light the size and breadth of it makes a lot more sense.