As House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson has described the 5-year farm bill his committee completed on Thursday:

"This is not a deal just between me and the folks that represent these people," Peterson said, referring to members representing subsidized farmers. "The speaker is involved in this."

Indeed, critics of the bill from the progressive community who have had the privilege to speak to Rep. Pelosi's staff about the legislation have been told in no uncertain terms that she will not tolerate any significant changes via amendment on the House floor. To further frustrate reform efforts, the farm bill is being rushed to the floor this Thursday, July 26. Amendments like the reform package to be brought forth by Democrat Ron Kind of Wisconsin must be delivered to the Rules Committee by 6 p.m. Tuesday, and if approved, will be allowed limited debate and a vote on the House floor.

But Speaker Pelosi's staff have made it clear that she firmly supports the bill as it is, and will make sure enough Democrats vote with her and the subsidy lobby to kill any reform that displeases Chairman Peterson.

So let's take a look at Speaker Pelosi's farm bill, starting where Michael Pollan started his celebrated dissection of America's food system, The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Let's start with corn.

For the next five years, American farmers are projected to do what was unthinkable when Michael wrote his book just a few years ago: plant and raise more corn than at any time in history, and get a strong price for it. It's almost entirely because of the ethanol boom, itself a creature of government, which this year will consume more corn than we export--over 20 percent of the crop.

And what a crop! Over 92 million acres of corn are in the ground now, more than we've planted since 1944.

How much is 92 million acres? You'll be in the ballpark if you think of California, 99 million acres not counting water, covered in corn and nothing but. Experts are now trying to ponder the implications of more than 100 million acres of corn in the years to come.

Since the weather is looking very favorable in the heart of the corn belt, we should have high per acre corn yields, truly a bumper crop this fall. In my thirty years working on farm policy, that combination of record plantings and good weather has always spelled ruinously low prices. But not this year. Despite the rain we had in Illinois and Iowa this past week, corn futures contracts for December delivery--the market window right after harvest that is typically the low period of the corn marketing year--closed above $3.30 a bushel on Friday. That's about 50 percent higher than it's been in recent years, and was considered by analysts a "retreat" in the market from recent weeks (much the way Wall Street will smell a bear these days if the Dow "drops" below 14,000).

All of which goes to say that we're heading for the first corn crop in history that should be worth well north of $40 billion.

Again, it's ethanol. And with the push to expand the industry even more, the Congressional Budget Office projected in March that corn would not be getting any of the subsidies that are tied to various price triggers set by Congress in the 2002 farm bill. Why? Because the ethanol-driven demand for corn is so strong that market prices are projected to remain above the government triggers. Of course, if the price falls below the levels Congress has set, those price-related corn subsidies would flow once again.

So that means we won't be providing subsidies to corn farmers, right? Far from it.

Under the Pelosi farm bill, on top of record income corn farmers will earn from the market, taxpayers will be obligated to continue providing an automatic $2 billion per year in "direct payments" to corn farmers. These are subsidies paid regardless of price or income conditions.

Pure and simple, it's a windfall subsidy of $10 billion from taxpayers to corn farmers over the next five years.

To put that in perspective, the Pelosi farm bill adds $4 billion over five years ($800 million per year) to the food stamp program. That increase, designed in part to retain the "buying power" of the $1 per meal food stamp "benefit", could easily have been found by reducing the corn windfall subsidy. Corn farmers still would have had $6 billion in subsidies left over--on top of record earnings in the marketplace, of course. We might have doubled the food stamp increase to $8 billion and still had $2 billion to waste--and in this market, for taxpayers, it is waste--on a corn windfall.

Instead, Speaker Pelosi forced House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel to find the extra $4 billion to pay for the food stamp increase. That way, Chairman Peterson won't have to dip into the corn subsidy windfall.

For those who thought Michael Pollan was onto something when he said this time we should have a food bill, not a farm bill, let's put the corn windfall subsidy Mr. Peterson is taking home to his own district via this 'reform' bill into perspective.

MN-7 stands to collect $320 million of that corn subsidy windfall over the next five years.

That is marginally less than the $350 million increase the Pelosi farm bill adds over five years for the entire nation to a program that provides fruits and vegetables instead of junk food to our kids as a school snack.

No, this isn't the "food bill" we'd all talked about, worked for. The bill that would shift emphasis away from a handful of subsidized crops and make big investments in healthier food, local farms, organic agriculture, the environment, nutrition programs...

Not even close. This, I say with regret, is Nancy Pelosi's farm bill.

If you're already disappointed, not to say shocked, that this legislation bears the imprimatur of a leader so many of us have revered and supported over the years, rest assured it will only get worse as you learn more about it.

If you eat, pay taxes, worry about the environment and are fed up with the subsidy status quo, it's time to make some noise.