House and Senate negotiators have agreed on a final compromise on the 2008 farm bill. But President Bush announced he will veto the farm bill that would spend almost $300 billion on the Agriculture Department’s food and farm programs – nutrition, conservation, energy and farm subsidy programs.

The legislation would increase the nutrition programs including food stamps and emergency domestic food assistance, by more than $10 billion over ten years; it would expand a program to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to schoolchildren; it assures growers of basic crops (wheat, cotton, corn) $5billion a year in automatic payments; it would add founds for conservation programs which should protect farmland; it would extend dairy programs and increase loan rates for sugar producers; cut expanded food assistance for an international school lunch program that was passed in the House farm bill last year, the Associated Press noted.

The bill would prohibit anyone earning more than $500,000 from farm-sources to get government payments. Also, couples who make more than $1 million would also be ineligible for subsidies. Under the current law, the limit is higher, married couples who make more than $5 million jointly are not eligible for government payments.

“I think, in a time of high commodity prices, to be raising loan limits and target prices just really flies in the face of reality,” said one of the opponents of the bill, House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio.

White House budget director Jim Nussle said the proposal is far too rich for the Bush administration, it spends too much and “doesn’t have hardly enough reform.”

"For those reasons, it would still be something that the administration would oppose," Nussle was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.