The disappointments contained in the 2007 Farm Bill being debated on the floor of the U.S. Senate this week are numerous, but most of them can be summed in two words: status quo.

The bill, which authorizes $283 billion in spending for a host of farm, nutrition and energy programs over the next five years, does little or nothing to reform an agricultural subsidy system that even its supporters are finding more and more difficult to defend.

Under the bill, the big five commodities - corn, wheat, soybeans, rice and cotton - will still receive billions of dollars in government "safety-net" payments at a time when farmers who produce those crops are getting record-high prices.

We liked President Bush's suggestion that a new Farm Bill should limit subsidy payments to farmers with an adjusted gross income of less than $200,000. The agriculture lobbyists in Washington, D.C., made quick work of that reform, of course. It failed in both the House bill and the version that passed the Senate Agriculture Committee. In those politics-as-usual bills, farmers who have incomes of $1 million ($2 million if husband and wife farm together) are eligible for taxpayer support of their businesses.

Some senators, including Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, are planning to offer amendments from the floor to impose lower income-eligibility limits once again and to cap payments at $250,000 for a married couple. Those seem eminently reasonable to us, but it appears that ag policy has at least as much to do with special interests as it does with reason.

Unlike editorial writers, President Bush has a veto pen, and he's threatening to use it on the Farm Bill.

Like the White House, we see this farm bill as costing too much and accomplishing too little.

All across America, people who wouldn't know a combine from a corn picker have begun to get educated about our complex and complicated farm subsidy programs and to call for reforms in them. Even here, in the middle of farm and ranch country, more and more Americans are questioning what the real consequences of U.S. farm policy are at home and abroad.

For all the disappointments the 2007 Farm Bill contains, the national debate it has created about the need to change the status quo gives us some reason to hope.