When it comes to picking taxpayer pockets, no one -- not the trial lawyers or even AARP -- has it over the farm lobby. How's this for clout? Though last year was one of the best ever for farm incomes -- up 44% to $87.5 billion -- farmers are about to score the most lavish subsidies in American history.

The House and Senate are now ironing out differences between their bills, and it's all but certain that farmers will get about $26 billion over the next five years in subsidies. Soybean and wheat farmers are slated to receive higher price supports, though bean prices hit a 34-year high last year and wheat prices have soared to a new record.

Corn producers will get subsidies of $10.5 billion over five years, which is on top of the deal of a lifetime these farmers were handed when Congress expanded ethanol subsidies. The handouts make growing corn so profitable that last year some 15.3 million acres were converted to new corn production, according to the USDA. That has a cascading effect on other prices, as farmers convert bean acreage to more lucrative corn fields and feed prices for meat producers climb.

There's also a new $5.1 billion emergency "trust fund" for farmers, with almost all the money directed to Georgia, Minnesota, North Dakota and Texas. New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg predicts that "if a large wind comes up and blows a mailbox over in North Dakota, it's going to be declared an emergency because somebody's going to want to get their hands on that billion dollars." Credit for that one goes to self-styled "deficit hawk" Kent Conrad, the free-spending North Dakota Democrat. So sweeping is the American Farm Bureau's victory that of the 22 crops that now receive price supports, 18 receive a more generous payment scheme under the Senate bill and 12 in the House bill.

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