Willey doesn't object to the original intent of farm subsidy legislation. When farm subsidies were first established in the 1930s, they protected farmers by mainly subsidizing staple crops: rice, corn, wheat and cotton, for example. These crops were at the center of American agriculture at the time. By protecting them, Willey says, the country showed farmers that the country appreciated their efforts.

"They were trying to create a parity system," Tom Willey says. "They were saying that a bushel of corn has intrinsic value -- that an hour of a farmer's labor is as valuable as a factory worker's."

The farm bills continued to focus on farmers' pay for the next 30 years. "In the '50s farmers earned 50 or 60 percent of the average American income," says Bruce Gardner, an agricultural economist at the University of Maryland. "Subsidies were a way to help them out."

During the 1970s, the combination of oil shocks and rising food prices shifted the focus toward security. A stable food supply, homegrown and low-priced, became a common theme in the rhetoric surrounding farm bills, which typically came up for a vote every five to seven years. Food subsidies became a matter of security, not just economics.

Through the 1980s and early 1990s subsidies continued, but with an increasing level of discontent. By the time the Willeys bought their 75-acre farm in 1995 for $280,000, a handful of critics began asking why large companies seemed to get most of the subsidies while small farmers lost out. And as deregulation became the rule of the day, calls for reform began to sound. Farmer incomes had risen to the national average; subsidies came to be seen as vestiges of the past.

The turning point came in 1996 when President Clinton signed the Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act and the Freedom to Farm Act. The laws looked like a stab at major reform. They dismantled the old system; the government stopped paying farmers to keep land fallow or grow certain amounts and instead simply gave them set amounts of money based on what they had grown in the past.

"The 1996 farm bill was a dramatic departure from traditional farm bills and programs," says Neil Ritchie, a national organizer for the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy, a nonprofit farming think tank. "The theory was that they were going to take away the subsidies programs; give direct payments for seven years, until they phased them out. Then the system would be free from the shackles of government and farming would work according to free markets."

At the time, commodities prices were relatively high. Farmers didn't mind removing the safety net when they were earning money, particularly when books like "Who Will Feed China?" suggested that the market for American exports would continue to grow faster than a field of weeds. But then the commodities markets collapsed. The Asian financial crisis sapped demand; countries such as Mexico and Brazil ramped up production and flooded the market.

Congress responded by bailing out the farmers with emergency assistance. This proved to be even more expensive than the older system of subsidies. In fact, direct payments to farmers soared in the late 1990s to more than $20 billion per year, up from an average of $9 billion in the early '90s, according to government figures.

The crisis continues to this day. For some commodities, prices are still nearly half what they were in the early '90s. The new bill, supporters argue, is an attempt to help farmers cope with this problem while avoiding the high price tag that results from last-second financing. Subsidies don't represent a lack of faith in free markets, they argue, but rather an acceptance of the market's status quo.

"The whole problem with the Freedom to Farm idea is that there is no free market," says Bruce Rominger, owner of a 3,000 acre farm in Yolo County, Calif. "You can put some farmers into a free market, but there are subsidies all over the planet. The European Union has large subsidies; Japan has incredibly large subsidies. So do other countries. It's not a flat and level playing field. It's unrealistic to think you can take away the protection in the farm bill and think everyone is going to be fine."

Rominger's farm, partly owned by his father, former Clinton administration Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Richard Rominger, earns several thousand dollars a year in subsidies. But, Rominger argues, other farmers also benefit from the cash the he and others earn.

"If you're in the San Joaquin Valley, and cotton doesn't look good, you're going look at almonds and other crops," he says. "Without subsidies, you'll go into the specialty crops and oversupply the market."

All farmers benefit from subsidies, he argues. "Even though the subsidies go to just a few of the commodity growers -- the people growing wheat, corn and rice, for example -- the benefit spreads throughout agriculture."

Legislators seem to agree. Asked who will benefit from the farm bill, after Congress completed negotiations on the bill, lead House negotiator Rep. Larry Combest, R-Texas, said simply: "I'll tell you who wins: the American farmer."

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