This compelling story about farm subsidies and EWG's Farm Subsidy Database by the AP's Nate Jenkins has run in over 80 outlets, online and in print, over the past few days.

The lede:

BENEDICT, NEB. - Ross Hirschfeld says folks have been talking behind his back ever since the local paper reported that he has been getting millions of dollars in farm subsidies from Washington.

Hirschfeld, a hands-on farmer who shovels hog manure on Saturdays, just as he has since grade school, says that fellow farmers get angry at him now when he buys land to expand. He says his daughter, who teaches school 300 miles away, has been asked by her grade-school students about her "rich father."

"People think, 'They got all that money, blah, blah, blah,' " Hirschfeld says.

Exactly how much Hirschfeld and other farmers get from Uncle Sam has become common knowledge around here because an environmental group has been posting names and figures on its Web site as part of its campaign against the nation's multibillion-dollar farm-subsidy program.

At small-town coffee shops across the countryside, talk about the weather and Nebraska football now competes with gossip about who is getting big bucks from Washington.

A bit further down, smaller farmers and livestock producers weigh in.

The information is raising tensions between smaller farmers and bigger producers in otherwise neighborly farm communities. And it may be turning some people against the subsidy program as it now operates.

"When the numbers came out, I thought it was too much," says Lynn Lowe, who has a small farm in the same county as Hirschfeld. "The government shouldn't be helping them out — they get more than we see per year" in income.

"When's enough enough?" Darell Bolton, a nearby farmer with a small operation, says of the Hirschfelds' checks.

What caught my eye, in particular, was this passage:

Nebraska Farmers Union President John Hansen accuses Cook of inaccurately portraying farmers as rich welfare recipients and ignoring the underlying reason for subsidies — to stabilize food production in an often volatile marketplace.

"He wants to ruin public support for farm programs," Hansen says. "Ken Cook knows good and well he's creating confusion and hard feelings and misunderstandings between ag players and nonag people, and his agenda is to do just that."

What's really dividing farmers--and not just in Nebraska but nationwide--is the fact that the biggest ones growing a few favored crops collect huge amounts of subsidies from taxpayers, year after year, while most farmers and ranchers receive little or nothing.

EWG's Farm Subsidy Database revealed the inequity. But it was created by wasteful farm subsidy programs that pay unlimited amounts of taxpayer money to the largest producers, mostly of the 5 favored crops.

And for the record, I've been a strong supporter of farm assistance programs for decades, and am proud of that record. I just happen to think we ought spend it better, and more fairly, than our commodity subsidies spend it.

Conservation programs are the best way to do that.