The takeoff was smooth. The landing was a lot rougher.

A proposed farm bill unanimously recommended last week by the House Agriculture Committee ran into some heavy weather on the House floor Friday before a largely Democratic majority passed it 231-191.

In the end, Nebraska Congressmen Jeff Fortenberry and Adrian Smith were two of only 19 Republicans to support a measure that contains $42 billion in assistance for farmers over the next five years.

Lee Terry, the third member of the state’s House delegation, and 176 other Republicans voted no.

Smith, whose sprawling district pulled in the most direct government payments in the nation in 2005, blamed the highly partisan outcome almost entirely on a Democratic decision to finance food stamp expenditures with new taxes on multi-national corporations.

“I think it would have had a lot of (Republican) votes but for that,” he said.

Fortenberry expressed his satisfaction with provisions that he said will promote agricultural entrepreneurship and agriculturally based energy production. Additional loan guarantees for biofuels plants were among what he saw as positive developments.

He and Smith were less satisfied with a move toward limiting farm payments based largely on $1 million in adjusted gross income.

That’s down from $2.5 million per farmer in the 2002 farm bill, but other adjustments could have distributed money more evenly than the system that currently gives about 70 percent of the money to 10 percent of farms.

“This was one of the disappointments,” Fortenberry said.

Smith was pleased that the House bill would end the practice of farmers collecting payments under more than one form of farm ownership.

By Fortenberry’s description, “we tried to throw a pass and score a touchdown, but we got a first down.”

Football analogies aside, action in the House on payment limits fell far short of the policy preferences of Chuck Hassebrook of the Nebraska Center for Rural Affairs.

Hassebrook noted that the limit on direct payments to a farm couple actually increased to $120,000,  from $80,000.

“So this bill, in spite of statements that it will tighten limitations, will in fact provide bigger checks to the nation’s biggest farms to drive smaller farmers out of business.”

Hassebrook was also rankled by a House decision that allows what he described as “mega farms” to use tax money to build livestock waste lagoons.

“That ought to just be a cost of doing business for these mega operations,” he said.

Smith didn’t buy that criticism. “The fact is there are a lot of government mandates on producers,” he said, “so we need to be considerate of producers when they (mandates) occur — regardless of size.”

Despite the partisan split in the House vote, the outcome played to reasonably good reviews from the Nebraska Farm Bureau Federation and the Nebraska Farmers Union, which often disagree on farm-policy fundamentals.

“The American Farm Bureau supported passage of the bill that came out of the House Agriculture Committee,” said Nebraska Farm Bureau President Keith Olsen. “So we’re happy it did pass. It’s just one step of many to getting a new farm bill.”

Nebraska Farmers Union President John Hansen saw the results as a step forward. “The House has put a very workable farm bill on the table that’s far from perfect and far from a train wreck,” Hansen said.

He’s happy about a House move to establish permanent emergency disaster authorization, for example, rather than continuing with a system that requires Congress to act annually on a case by case basis on drought and other calamities.

While the Farmers Union also favors tighter payment limitations, the House result does say that those payments should also be denied to those with adjusted gross incomes above $500,000, unless at least two-thirds of the money came as agricultural income.

Brad Lubben, farm policy specialist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said the intent of the two-thirds approach is simple enough. “They’re targeting what has been characterized in the media as wealthy non-farm interests who have been grabbing government program dollars.”

The House action on payment limits might hit a different target in some cases. “Some of these people who will be kicked out by the new limits were receiving conservation rather than commodity money,” he said. “Now is that a good or a bad thing?”

The focus of farm bill attention now shifts to the Senate, which has been much slower to act as the expiration date for the 2002 farm bill approaches.

Olsen wants to see that change quickly. “They keep talking about doing something in September,” he said. “I hope that’s the case.”

Fortenberry called the House vote “one bookend of the discussion.” But he cited other examples of what he saw as progress, including value-added producer grants for small- and medium-size farms and energy self-sufficiency programs for rural communities that want to use wind power and other means to meet their energy needs.

“This has been met with a great deal of excitement on the committee,” he said of the bill advanced by the House ag panel.

Reach Art Hovey at (402) 523-4949 or at ahovey@alltel.net.