(DTN) Mutual back-scratching and coalition building. For decades that's been the formula for passing a farm bill. Never mind agriculture's tiny share of the nation's population. If farmers growing different crops in different regions stuck together and if conservation and feed-the-hungry groups got theirs, too, farm bills passed.

Question for the 2012 farm bill: Does slash-and-burn budget cutting put that formula at risk?

You have to think so. Consider how the House wielded the ax in passing the 2012 agriculture appropriations bill. The total cut was $2.7 billion from the previous year. Of that, $760 million came from conservation programs, $686 million from one of the domestic programs to feed the poor, $354 million from research, $337 million from rural development and $285 million from food safety.

Notice what wasn't cut: Direct payments, countercyclical payments, the loan program and other subsidies to farmers. An amendment to put a $125,000 payment cap on them was voted down, as was an amendment to take them away from those with adjusted gross income north of $250,000.

The bottom line: Legislators chopped away at two legs of the three-legged stool that supports the farm bill -- conservation and nutrition. The solons went out of their way to spare the third leg, farm program payments. They chopped $147 million the U.S. pays Brazil because our cotton subsidies were held to violate World Trade Organization rules, but they voted against amendments to take the money out of direct payments and to make the cotton-subsidy program WTO-legal.

This determination to protect farm-program payments at any cost may be good news for farmers in the short run. Problem is, it leaves the 2012 farm bill with a wobbly stool. Viewing the maneuvering to protect farm programs ahead of the appropriations bill vote, one Congressional supporter of nutrition programs commented that "nothing has changed with regard to farm subsidies, it's the same old, same old."

Am I making too much of this? After all, the House vote is only an opening shot. The Senate could report a very different ag appropriations bill. The president has veto power. And, granted, it isn't unusual for an appropriations bill to ignore "mandatory" programs like the farm subsidies. They're mandatory because Congress didn't want them to have to go through the appropriations process every year. Can't we just leave it to the House and Senate ag committees to rebalance the stool when they take up the 2012 farm bill?

Well, no. If the Senate meets the House even halfway in cutting conservation, nutrition, research and rural development, those cuts could affect the "baseline" for the 2012 farm bill, making it that much more difficult for Congress to find funds for them in the future. Then, too, most of the good men and women on the Congressional ag committees represent farm districts. It won't be in their re-election interests to take money from farm programs in favor of, say, food aid.

Advocates of the other two legs of the stool know all this. Their always shaky alliances with farm interests will be even shakier next year. If the coalition doesn't hold, if it's every interest for itself on the House and Senate floors, farm interests will suffer.

Yet at this point, farm interests themselves haven't jelled. What will be ag's position on divvying up whatever budget is available? Will ag groups find a way to settle their differences on direct payments? Will they throw the cotton programs under the bus? Best anyone can tell, the ag groups aren't even talking to each other, much less to the environmental and nutrition groups.

Yes, it's early in the process. But the process is going to be so rocky this time that an early start is critical. What's needed are constructive proposals designed to hold the broad farm bill coalition together. Those won't be easy to hammer out. All the more reason to get started working on them now.

http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/