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It seems impossible, but that's what House Agriculture Committee Chairman Larry Combest, R-Texas, suggested last week.

The House of Representatives on March 28 passed a budget resolution that included a provision to provide more money for agriculture. That's good news for farmers. But the situation is messy. Combest and House Agriculture Committee ranking member Charles Stenholm, D-Texas, are in disagreement over this approach, which also pits crop growers against livestock producers.

The measure would give agriculture access to the $514 billion Strategic Reserve Fund for both emergency spending for this year and for a higher budget allocation through 2011 if the House Agriculture Committee passes a bill to reauthorize the commodity title of the 1996 farm bill -- the one that provides money to crop growers -- before July 11. House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle has said he wants to remove the uncertainty facing farmers by forcing the House Agriculture Committee to rewrite the title this year. Combest seems to agree. But the Democrats and the rest of agriculture worry that only the crop growers will get their programs.

On March 30, Combest told Reuters that "if everything went right," the House Agriculture Committee could complete the entire farm bill by July 11, but that if it does not, it will work on the rest of the bill immediately after the July 1 deadline. Combest also said that he will not send "anything less than a full bill" to the House floor.

But the prospects for such speedy action on a full farm including nutrition, research, rural development and conservation titles are so poor that livestock groups such as the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the National Pork Producers Council say they are concerned about the committee passing one title of the farm benefiting crop producers without a title that benefits them. Their leaders worry that there will not be enough money left to pay for the conservation programs they want in the farm bill. National Cattlemen's Beef Association lobbyist Chandler Keys said March 29 that livestock groups understand the pressures on the House Agriculture Committee to submit a commodity title to the Budget Committee by July 11, but that they want a "placemarker" for conservation spending on the EQIP program, which ranchers use to address water quality problems, so that there is an "equitable" distribution of money between row crop and livestock producers.

The situation also caused a split between the American Farm Bureau Federation, which favors Combest's approach, and at least one state organization, the Iowa Farm Bureau, which has expressed concerns about passing a measure dealing only with row crops and not the rest of agriculture.

Agricultural lobbyists say Combest and the House Agriculture Committee staff have said that all the ag groups should trust Combest and House Budget Chairman Nussle, who wrote the provision, because the two chairmen are trying to insure that they can lock up money for agriculture.

The budget resolution apparently does not require that the commodity title pass the House or the Senate before agriculture would become eligible for an increased budget. Neither Senate Agriculture Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., nor ranking member Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, have shown much interest in taking up the commodity title at an early point in the farm bill debate, and Senate Agriculture Committee staff director Keith Luse has told DTN that Lugar is most likely to mark up either the conservation, research or rural development title this year, but wants to hold hearings on the range of titles in the bill.

Stenholm told an ag policy conference March 27 that he disagrees with Combest's and Nussle's approach of passing a commodity title alone. Stenholm did not mention the livestock groups' opposition, but said the next farm bill must help address "water quality' issues to avoid a confrontation between "landowners and consumers" that could lead to restrictions on private property.

Former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, in one of his first speeches since leaving office, called for a full-scale debate on farm policy rather than a continuation of Freedom to Farm with more money and said he doesn't want agriculture to become a "permanent dependency" of the government.

Conference organizer John Schnittker, a consultant who served in the Kennedy administration, said he fears crop surpluses will become so vast in the next few years that the Bush administration will be forced to encourage farmers to take land out of production and pointed out that the Reagan administration introduced them for budgetary reasons in the mid 1980s even though it was ideologically opposed to land retirement programs. Schnittker also noted that Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, Lugar and Combest had been invited to the conference, but that no Republican accepted the invitation.