Next Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Time, the Environmental Working Group will publish (here on Mulch) the names of every prospective beneficiary of the single, costliest farm subsidy provision in the farm bill the House Agriculture Committee will approve today, and the amount of benefit taxpayers will provide to each of them over the next five years.

I'm scrolling down the list for California now, and for the life of me I cannot find Constance Bowles.

There's a William H. Nichols, of Chico, who stands to collect $265,783; Clarence Ritchie, Visalia, who will qualify for $243,980 under the program. Peter Knight and Kimberly Van Ree, both of Glenn, are among the eight Californians whose benefits we project will exceed $240,000.

This particular subsidy for farm businesses with multiple owners will be even higher. The nine owners of Dublin Farms, in Corcoran, California, for instance, are in line for $1,930,025 over five years. Next come the eight owners of Sandridge Partners, whose benefits are sent by USDA to the Silicon Valley hamlet of Sunnyvale for farms in Kings and Tulare counties. They should be due $1,321,125.

By our calculations, 242 California farm businesses will receive at least $250,000 over the next five years.

To the uninitiated, it may be hard to fathom how a farm subsidy benefit could possibly be projected five years into the future with such precision, considering the vagaries of weather, cropping patterns and yields, oscillating market prices, and all the other confounding factors that make farming such an unpredictable business.

The answer, which may be even harder to fathom, is that these subsidy payments are utterly predictable. They're automatic, in fact. Taxpayers will be obligated to provide them even if crop prices climb and farm incomes soar, come rain or shine, bumper crop or bust. To qualify, beneficiaries won't have to sit on a tractor--or even look at one-- plant a seed, or so much as visit their farm, much less live on it. In fact, they won't have to be living at all. Beneficiaries can receive this subsidy even, heaven forbid, in death.

It's called a "direct payment," and it is the primary treasury-draining spigot in a farm payment package that Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has declared to be 'reform'. It is the kind of policy you might expect if you allowed farm subsidy reform to be determined by the subsidized. Which is what Speaker Pelosi has allowed the House agriculture committee to do.

Their credentials on these matters are as immutable as money. Among their 46 districts they share 42 percent of total federal crop subsidies.

The list of beneficiaries consists of people and businesses who will share a staggering $26 billion in federal farm subsidy payments through the year 2012. Over 92 percent of that money will be restricted to just five crops (corn, wheat, cotton, soybeans and rice). California's share will be $844 million.

I'm looking for Mrs. Bowles because she is the improbable #1 beneficiary of federal crop subsidies in the state of California. Her crop benefits amounted to $1,210,865 over three recent years (2003-2005), according to USDA data EWG obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. I say "improbable" top beneficiary because an average of $403,621 per year is a fair amount of crop subsidy money for someone who lives in San Francisco (94118). Then again, she is hardly the only farmer in those parts; there's at least one for every dot on this map. That would include George Bowles, another of the nine owners of the Bowles Farming Company; his crop subsidy benefits amounted to $1,320, 856 over that period from the company's operations in Merced County.

Adding all the other owners and including additional conservation payments brings the company's total subsidy to $2,688,019 over three years.

Alas, Mrs. Bowles is not on the list for automatic direct subsidies. Nor is George Bowles, nor any of the companies' other owners.

What, under Speaker Pelosi's farm bill reforms, will become of them?

Next: In Part II, we'll learn about the payment limitation 'reforms' and changes in direct subsidies and loan payments in the House Agriculture Committee's farm bill. We'll learn that the average adjusted gross income of tax filers in the Merced Zip code where the Bowles Farming Company is located was $46,637 in 2004, according to the IRS. In Mrs. Bowles' s San Francisco Zip code, it was $124,213.