House appropriators tomorrow will mark up a bill to scale back the Department of Agriculture's fiscal year 2012 budget by more than 13 percent.

The appropriations bill is part of the House Republican plan released on May 11 to cut a net $30 billion from 2012 department budgets relative to the recently passed fiscal 2011 measure.

The $2.7 billion cut for agriculture, representing the third highest percentage cut to all departments, is on top of a $3 billion reduction made in the final 2011 budget bill. It is unclear whether cuts will be made uniformly through all agencies within USDA or if some areas will bear a greater share of the pain than others.

Mandatory funding for farm bill conservation programs already took an almost $500 million hit in the fiscal 2011 bill. The Conservation Stewardship Program was slashed by $39 million, while 87 percent of discretionary funding was cut from the Rural Energy for America Program.

The Wetlands Reserve Program was reduced by almost 48,000 acres, and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program was cut by $350 million relative to the levels written into the 2008 farm bill.

Ferd Hoefner, policy director of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said he was cautiously optimistic that farm bill mandatory spending won't be hit as hard in conservation this time around.

If mandatory spending is cut like that again, "it becomes a nightmare for the 2012 farm bill," Hoefner said.

Both House and Senate lawmakers have expressed worries about how the various budget proposals this year would affect the 2012 bill.

"We have one heck of a challenge," Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) told a group of National Farmers Union representatives in April.

House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) also said he worried that the 500 or so amendments offered on the House continuing resolution do not bode well for the 2012 farm bill.

"If Speaker [John] Boehner (R-Ohio) allowed that access on the CR, we may have to defend everything on the farm bill," he said in April (E&E Daily, April 13).

But there will be less to take from in other areas in Agriculture's budget this time around. The fiscal year 2011 bill removed all congressional earmark funding and a number of rescissions of previously approved appropriations.

Both of those are one-time fixes that won't be available when lawmakers dig into the budget Tuesday.

"Whereas they can mitigate some of the severity of the cuts in fiscal year '11 because they had some of those other options, they really don't have those options this time around," Hoefner said.

The Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee will hold the markup.

The Senate, meanwhile, has not voted on or marked up a 2012 budget resolution. The Senate Appropriations Committee has asked senators to submit agriculture spending requests by May 27.

Schedule: The markup is tomorrow at 4 p.m. in 2362A Rayburn.