As it has here, disclosure of farm subsidy payments has created quite a stir in Europe, thanks to the folks at www.farmsubsidy.org.

It's a lot harder to pull off on the other side of the pond--25 countries, each with its own information disclosure rules, not to mention all the languages.

But a resolute and inventive band of nongovernmental organizations, journalists and academic researchers has been steadily disclosing "Who gets what from the Common Agricultural Policy."

Just recently they've topped a million searches on the Web site, and they've generated a ton of media coverage--earning one of the principal collaborators, Nils Mulvad, recognition as European Voice's Journalist of the Year. EWG is proud to be working with them.

Check out their site. Nestle's, anyone?

The editorial page of the San Francisco Chronicle weighed in on the 2007 farm bill the other day.

Here's the passage that caught my eye.

Both Republican and Democrats have argued that the 2007 farm bill should widen the field of crops that qualify for payments, as it is not fair to use federal dollars to prop up wheat, but not carrots. As a Californian, Pelosi has reason to support federal subsidies for fruits, nuts and veggies. The challenge to the new Congress will be to be fairer to a broader range of farmers without raising the tab to all taxpayers.

If California agriculture seriously engages in this farm bill, it will be a first. And it could change the political dynamics dramatically if the state's delegation presses for something resembling the agenda laid out by the Specialty Crop Farm Bill Alliance.

In other words, maybe California will stop being...

Has organic agriculture really become just another big, soulless business? That's what we've read nonstop the last eight months, most recently in lengthy take-outs in The Economist, Business Week, and of course in Michael Pollan's writings, notably his last book, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

A different perspective jumps out of a little noticed USDA update on organic agriculture trends released in early December (by ERS economist Catherine Greene).

It turns out the area of U.S. farmland in certified organic production expanded nearly 1 million acres for the second year in a row in 2005.

With that leap, organic agriculture now comprises 0.50 percent—one-half of one percent—of the more than 796 million acres of U.S. farmland devoted to crops and livestock.

That's right, out of nearly 800 million acres, a titanically trivial four million are certified organic.

How can this be? Hasn't organic agriculture grown explosively in recent years?

Virtually all of the bedazzled accounts of the organic agriculture sector’s growth have focused on retail organic food sales, not physical measures of food production like acres or pounds of food. Sales have grown dramatically because of the increase in higher-value foods, including processed foods like dairy products and cereals, and also eggs, some meats (notably poultry) and fresh-market vegetables.

But in acreage terms, organic agriculture's laudable growth from its miniscule base has brought it to a...somewhat less miniscule fraction of U.S. farm production. Fruit production, for instance, takes up a very small slice of the U.S. agricultural landscape, under 4 million acres in 2005. Organic fruit occupied only 2.5 percent of it. Vegetable production in the United States is confined to about 2.1 million acres, and organic’s share is 4.6 percent.

And those are the crops where organic has the biggest presence. Corn is an entirely different story. The area devoted certified organic corn increased by a third between 2004 and 2005. But that brought the grand total to 130,672 acres nationwide, out of almost 82 million acres of corn grown that year, or 0.16 percent. And of course, most of that is GMO corn, and a rapidly growing share of it is going into ethanol production. So in the heartland, the problem isn't "big organic". It's "almost no organic".

Of course, organic dairy has been the subject of most of the controversy, because of the flawed USDA organic rules for pasturage that have allowed some very large operations to be certified organic. It's an important issue, no doubt, both for consumers and perhaps for small to mid-size dairy operators. But meanwhile, the nation's entire organic dairy herd stands (and moos) at just over 86,000 animals in a national herd of more than 9 million dairy cows, making organic's share just under 1 percent.

I'll be writing a lot more about this in the days ahead, as EWG reframes the debate to where it should be on this issue for the 2007 Farm Bill: how can we expand domestic organic production?

Is our main concern about organic really that it has become a corporatized behemoth that has 'lost its soul' when, after all its much discussed "growth", we find ourselves in this latest count with fewer than 8,500 certified organic producers nationwide?

This is 'big organic'? There are more farmers in New Jersey

The EWG Farm Subsidy Database has pointed out (as many other sources subsequently have) that farm subsidy payments are highly concentrated among large farms, with 10 percent collecting 73 percent of the money over the past 11 years.

But as this table shows, most U.S. farmers get no government payments at all.

Most of those farmers and ranchers don't want intrusive price and income supports of the sort provided to rice, cotton, corn, wheat and soybean growers.

But many would participate in federal farm conservation programs to protect wildlife, water quality, wetlands, and prime farm land, if, that is, the programs' funds weren't constantly being cut to preserve commodity subsidies most farmers don't receive--or even qualify for.

That would be about $82 billion and change over the past eleven years.

Here's the list. Scroll down to number 22 and you'll top 50 percent of all subsidies.

These are big districts; some of them are entire states, of course. But they don't comprise half the farms, half the farmland, half the value of farm production in this country, or half the demand for federal assistance to deal with problems in rural America.

That imbalance is one reason why we're hearing more from fruit, vegetable and livestock producers, conservationists, and rural development experts about the need for new, fairer ways to invest federal farm bill resources.

There's a nice piece today (subscription required) by Robert Pore in the Grand Island Independent on the EWG Farm Subsidy Database's tally of farm subsidy payments for 2005 to Nebraska's enormous 3rd Congressional District, now held by Rep. Tom Osborne. Congressman-elect Adrian Smith will take over when the 110th Congress convenes in January.

Here's a look at NE-3's profile from the 2002 Census of Agriculture. This is a good example of how a districts's ranking based on the market value of agricultural products sold matches up with the subsidy ranking: the top ranking for subsidies in 2005 jives with the district's #2 ranking in 2002 for market value of agricultural products sold.

But you wonder how enthused all those NE-3 cattlemen and other livestock producers will be about proposals to continue big crop subsidy payments if those payments come on top of the high market prices the animal protein world is facing now now for corn and soybeans. The value of livestock products in NE-3 considerably exceeds the value of crops.

Maybe the district's livestock producers would prefer to see more investment in federal conservation and rural development programs instead?

We've had several million searches in the past week, since we updated the EWG Farm Subsidy Database (on Dec. 17) with data for more than $21 billion in payments for 2005. We're now tracking 11 years' worth of farm subsidies from taxpayers totaling nearly $165 billion.

We reset the counter on Nov. 29, 2004, after logging 150 million searches or more. We've since seen 72+ million more searches and are racking up about 200,000 or so a day. You can get a sense of the traffic by simply refreshing the main (map) page and checking the counter at the upper left.

Our most popular links? Top recipients, of course. You can find top recipient lists at the national, state, county and congressional district levels, and for many different programs and subsidy categories.

For example, here is a list not often viewed--the top recipients of disaster payments.

Of course, we'll see some important changes in top recipient listings after we finish analyzing and post the Sec. 1614 tracking database we obtained from USDA last week.

It won't be long.

Yesterday the Washington Post published the last in the series of farm subsidy stories that debuted last June Harvesting Cash: Working a Farm Subsidy.

This installment describes the struggle to place caps on farm subsidies, which are now unlimited because large producers collect unlimited taxpayer payments through loan defaults and commodity certificates.

There may be no better sign of the changing debate over the nation's farm subsidies: A Midwestern governor running for president calls for cuts in a system that has steered hundreds of millions of dollars a year to his state.

"I didn't get much of a reaction from farmers," said Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D), "because deep down most of them know the system needs to be changed."

Politicians such as Vilsack have joined a host of interest groups from across the political spectrum that are pressing for changes in government assistance to agriculture. They want the money moved from large farmers to conservation, nutrition, rural development and energy research. Vilsack, for example, favors programs that improve environmental practices on farms.

In particular, the Post notes how an amendment by Senators Charles "$275,000 is enough" Grassley and Byron Dorgan, which passed overwhelmingly in the Senate in 2002, simply disappeared during the horse trading in the House-Senate Conference Committee. The House version had no comparable amendment, but a non-binding House Motion to Instruct the Conferees, authored by Rep. Ron Kind of Wisconsin, had recommended adoption of the Senate's payment limit and conservation provisions, and had passed overwhelmingly.

Of course, this is a commodity-specific debate that for the most part pits very large-scale rice and cotton farmers who collect huge subsidies, the majority of them in the South, against the rest of agriculture.

Defenders of the status quo are basically arguing that Southern agriculture is entirely unsustainable without perpetually unlimited subsidies to its very largest producers.

That assertion is where the battle lines on payment limits will form in next year's farm bill.

This is a blog about food and agriculture policy, politics, science and culture.

Mulch draws on my work and my colleagues' at Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization that uses the power of information to protect public health and the environment. Although EWG has published research on a wide range of food and farm policy issues, we may be best known for publishing the names of millions of federal farm subsidy recipients and the amount of taxpayer money they have collected on our Farm Subsidy Database. We update it regularly with new subsidy data and analyses.

She was already a famous journalist in agricultural circles when I met her, in the early 1980s. I was learning how to lobby at the hand of Maureen Hinkle of National Audubon, writing policy stuff for Sierra Club, and free-lancing as a consultant and writer, mostly trying to stitch some conservation into the farm subsidy system. No one knew me, but everyone knew her. She was Sonja Hillgren, UPI.

The eyes were big, dark, serious, an intellectual’s; pity the source they fixed upon who played the fool, like the budget-cutting boobs in the Reagan administration who tried to pass ketchup off as a vegetable in the school lunch program. But the smile transformed her when it flashed, which was often, and I was always a bit startled to see her beauty take over. Though she was a journalist through and through, she never looked the part. Always faultlessly coiffed and dressed to kill, Sonja looked as if she’d stepped out of the pages of Town and Country, not a scrum of reporters circling a committee chairman or ag secretary. Of course, by the time most of those scrums had formed Sonja had long since filed the story--and with better sources.

Sonja was one of the first mainstream journalists to understand the potential of conservationists as players in farm policy as the 1985 Farm Bill was taking shape. Hell, she understood it before we did. Her stature in farm policy circles was such that we gained credibility simply because she wrote about us and our ideas. An interview with Sonja set friendship aside, a ground rule she conveyed with an arch of her eyebrow and enforced with tough, probing questions. It was all business. You emerged with your facts in better order or in need of quick reinforcements; your policy proposals sharpened or in tatters; and with a high-altitude perspective on where it all fit within the realpolitik of farm policy.

Sonja left UPI for a stint at Knight Ridder before joining Farm Journal in 1990, and she became its editor and moved to Philly in 1995. Her DC friends saw less of her thereafter, of course, so every chance to grab lunch or dinner was an occasion. About that time she was elected president of the National Press Club, and I remember how proud I felt whenever I saw her commandeer the podium at a Press Club lunch, poised, confident, at the very top of her profession.

I spoke with her for the last time in October, minutes after the shock of her email about the brain tumor. She'd had surgery by then and was about to undergo further treatment, but she was feeling good that day, and sounded hopeful and determined. But the lede in our conversation was a wonderful man named Bruce Downs, to whom she had been engaged when the cancer was discovered. They married while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery--he'd insisted on it. I hope to meet him some day.

We had the chance to share our feelings for one another on that call, as I know she did with so many of her friends these past few months. I promised to check in, but when I did, in late November, Sonja didn't respond. Unusual for her. I found myself thinking about her a lot this past Tuesday. As I found out from Chuck Abbott the next morning, Sonja had died in her sleep that very night.

I'm on the wrong coast to attend the service, which is underway as I write. So I'm starting my blog on farm policy instead, with this entry. Sonja would have written it better and faster.

She had potent laugh impossible not to conspire with. It started when that smile of hers burst wide open, then it grabbed hold, rocking her in waves of joyful, hyperventilative gasps. When something struck her as particularly funny, you sometimes couldn't hear Sonja laugh at all.