Farm Bill in the House Agriculture Committee

See FarmPolicy and Ethicurean for coverage of today's hearing in the House Agriculture Committee, or listen to the streaming audio yourself.

Meanwhile, I am fascinated by efforts to crunch the numbers and fashion a Farm Bill reform proposal that benefits a majority of Congressional districts that are represented on the House Agriculture Committee. You can see the appeal of this question. Of course, urban and suburban districts would benefit from reform, but their legislators do not care enough to spend political capital on this issue and they do not sit on the House Agriculture Committee. The clever question is to ask what combination of fruit and vegetable subsidies, conservation payments, rural development projects, and community food programs should win the votes of a majority of legislators on the committee.

See this post from the Blog for Rural America and this post from the Ruminant.