The SF Chronicle has stayed right on top of the farm bill soap opera all year long with hard hitting coverage on both the news and editorial sides. Here's the latest from Carolyn Lochhead ("New farm bill retains big crop subsidies").

Prominent Los Altos developer John Vidovich and various family members in the Sandridge Partnership of Sunnyvale were the nation's biggest recipients of automatic government payments to farmers last year, receiving more than $1 million, according to a new analysis of federal data by Environmental Working Group.

. . .The payments are heavily weighted to the biggest producers, with the top 10 percent getting two-thirds of the subsidies.

Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group, which opposes the subsidies, drew a contrast between the $1,064,134 payment to Sandridge Partners and the $600 economic stimulus payments now going out to taxpayers.

"Congress is about to be grotesquely generous to big, subsidized farms that are now enjoying unprecedented prosperity," Cook. said. The list of recipients for payments last year "makes clear the disturbing degree to which congressional leaders are catering to the powerful farm subsidy lobby at the expense of ordinary American taxpayers."

The payments will continue to go out automatically under a new $300 billion farm bill Congress has in the works, despite an 80 percent rise in grain prices over the past three years.