Hoping to sway agriculture lawmakers before a Friday deadline to submit deficit-reduction recommendations, national farm and conservation groups have released their own proposals for cutting subsidies, conservation and nutrition programs.

In the past couple of weeks, plans have rolled in from groups including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and, most recently, the National Farmers Union. The proposals both address deficit reduction and lay out policy options for the next reauthorization of the farm bill.

"Agriculture is prepared to take a proportionate and equitable share of budget cuts provided everything is on the table," wrote the National Corn Grower's Association, in a common theme among the various pitches.

On the table in the farm policy debate are some of agriculture's sacred cows -- farmer subsidies and crop insurance -- as well as programs that give farmers money to set aside land for conservation and make environmental improvements. Last week, two GOP lawmakers introduced a bill that would cut subsidies and conservation funding (E&E Daily, Oct. 7).

President Obama, in his proposal to reduce the deficit by $3 trillion, also has recommended cutting subsidies, conservation and crop insurance (E&E Daily, Sept. 21).

Members of the House and Senate Agriculture committees have until Friday to submit recommendations to Congress' 12-member Joint Deficit Reduction Committee.

"My colleagues and I are working on a bipartisan basis to come to agreement on a set of policies that would actually make sure that our farmers and our small businesses are able to be successful and have the tools they need when they need it," Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) recently told FarmPolicy.com, "and at the same time providing real and credible reforms to reduce the deficit, so that's what we're working on."

Any reductions that come from the joint committee and through the congressional appropriations process will likely have wide-ranging impacts on farmers for the next decade. Cuts will affect how much money is available for the next reauthorization of the farm bill, which determines funding for a slew of priorities.

About 99 percent of the current farm bill is made up of commodity, conservation and nutrition programs, with the latter taking up the most funding.

The country's largest agriculture group, the American Farm Bureau Federation, proposes that conservation programs, farm subsidies and nutrition programs should each receive 30 percent of the cuts agreed to by the House and Senate Agriculture committees. The remaining 10 percent should be cut from crop insurance subsidies that benefit private companies, the group says.

The Farm Bureau has recommended that two-thirds of conservation reductions should come from land retirement programs, or those that help farmers take often-marginal acres out of production. The other cuts would come from working lands programs, or programs that help farmers pay for fences around streams, cleaner manure storage solutions and other items.

The farm bill's signature conservation program, the Conservation Reserve Program, should be reduced and its eligibility requirements tightened so that less-highly erodible land is not allowed, the Farm Bureau says. Meanwhile, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which provides farmers a portion of the funding needed for environmental improvements, should be kept intact to guard farmers against future regulations.

Overall, conservation programs should be consolidated, the Farm Bureau recommends. Earlier this year, the conservative Washington, D.C., think tank American Enterprise Institute also proposed consolidating programs (Greenwire, July 12).

"We believe 23 conservation programs are too many," the bureau writes. "We encourage the committees to consolidate the current programs into a working lands program, a retirement lands program and a Conservation Reserve Program."

The bureau is urging the joint committee to keep a combination of direct payments, counter-cyclical payments, commodity loan program and crop insurance to help farmers deal with risks from weather and fuel prices, among others.

But two of the nation's other big agriculture groups -- the National Cotton Council and the American Soybean Association -- instead suggest that Congress get rid of direct payments to farmers.

The Soybean Association and the National Corn Growers Association are asking lawmakers to create a new revenue-based program to manage risks. Such a program would give farmers money for deviations from average revenue due to crop diseases, weather, volatile commodity markets and other risks.

The Soybean Association's proposal specifically recommends cuts in conservation.

"ASA strongly supports the role that conservation programs play in supporting the land and water stewardship plans of producers of soybeans and other crops," the association writes. "However, given the cost of these programs, we believe they should be included in helping to meet agriculture's share of deficit reduction."

The Environmental Working Group, one of 56 groups that laid out conservation goals in a letter to Congress last month, blasted the proposals from the large agriculture associations.

"We are at risk of erasing hard-won conservation gains achieved in recent decades and of undermining future generations' ability to feed a growing population," said David DeGennaro, legislative and policy analyst for EWG. The proposals are "a blatant attempt to hold onto cash in times of record farm income in spite of public sentiment and fiscal realities."

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition says conservation already has been unfairly gutted through the federal budget process. There should be no further cuts to those programs, nor to conservation programs that do not have baseline funding beyond 2012, NSAC says.

"Congress should not make the mistake of assuming that newer, more innovative, pro-growth farm bill programs should come to an end because of budget pressures," NSAC wrote. "Programs should not be judged by their age or baselines, but by their merits."

The National Farmers Union, which released its white paper on the farm bill Monday, says it supports maintaining the farm bill's energy programs that help make energy efficiency improvements, plant biofuel crops and establish biorefineries in rural areas. None of those programs have baseline funding beyond 2012, and their futures are very much up in the air.

Although not part of a specific farm bill proposal, the Forests in the Farm Bill Coalition, which includes conservation and forestry groups, sent a letter to members of the House and Senate Agriculture committees last month asking them to include strong provisions for forest protection in conservation programs.