The House and Senate took a big step toward reconciling their vastly different versions of the farm bill this week, but farmers and their lenders are still nervous.
Late Tuesday the conference committee released a statement saying that the two sides had set up a framework for using the $73.5 billion, 10-year farm bill budget to pay for policy initiatives.
The agriculture-news Web site AgWeb.com reported late Tuesday that the committees tentative funding framework included $46 billion for commodities, $17.1 billion for conservation, $2.6 billion for dairy, sugar, and peanuts. A congressional source cautioned that these numbers were simply guidelines for legislative staff working on the bill.
With that in place, the staff for each side will begin working to resolve the policy differences that make the bills so different. Their goal is to have a final bill ready for approval by mid-April six months after the House passed its version of the bill.
When the Senate passed its version, in February, it was clear that reconciling the two would not be easy. Just looking at them side by side highlights their differences. The conference committee refers to copies of the bill that are double-spaced and have every line of text numbered so that conferees can compare them easily. The House bill has 381 pages and the Senate bill 1,335.
The House bill, called the Farm Security Act of 2001, focuses primarily on commodity programs to help producers who are having trouble supporting themselves solely from farming.
The Senate bill, the Agriculture, Conservation, and Rural Enhancement Act of 2002, also provides for commodities programs but puts more emphasis on conservation. It also includes items such as special bankruptcy protection for farmers and a ban on meat-packing companies owning livestock.
Despite the move forward, the industry is getting anxious. Bankers said that until a final bill is passed, they are making loans on faith that there will be some government support.
The ability for this law to have any impact on 2002 gets less and less as spring moves farther north, said John M. Blanchfield, the director of the American Bankers Associations Center for Agricultural and Rural Banking.
With no specific guidelines about future government support, banks lend with the idea that a farm bill or a supplemental payment will be forthcoming not an unreasonable assumption, Mr. Blanchfield said. We have a Congress and two administrations that have gone along with these payments.
Even with the funding framework in place, congressional sources say, much work needs to be done. The tasks include deciding whether there should be limits on the amount of government support farmers can receive and whether they should get special bankruptcy protection.
The protection was added as an amendment to the Senate version by Sen. Jean Carnahan, D-Mo. The amendment would make Chapter 12 of the federal Bankruptcy Code a provision that has been renewed in five-year increments since 1986 permanent. The provision is designed to help family farms in financial difficulty by streamlining the bankruptcy process. The last five-year increment expired in October.
One observer, who asked not to be named, said this was a sign that the Senate was abandoning the bankruptcy reform bill that has been in the chamber since the beginning of 2001.
But Tony Wyche, the communications director for Sen. Carnahan, said that the Senate was not giving up on that bill but rather that it was concerned about the expiration of Chapter 12. 
