Last November the U.S. Senate defeated an effort to put firm caps on commodity program payments when it voted on legislation to cut federal spending.

An issue that has been smoldering since then flared up again this week when Senator Chuck Grassley announced that the USDA has put together a database that will allow farm payments to be tracked to individual farmers whose payments were earlier reported only as a large lump sum by co-ops and companies.

"From now on we should be able to tack each dollar paid to a producer," Grassley told reporters earlier this week.

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Setting up the database was one of the compromises reached when the 2002 Farm Bill was written. Members of the House Agriculture Committee who opposed capping program payments agreed to set up a commission to study the issue and to require USDA to do a better job of keeping track of payments.

Last November, Grassley and Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) wrote Ag Secretary Mike Johanns to ask that the USDA set up the database.

"It has been three years since the 2002 Farm Bill was signed into law by President Bush, and USDA has yet to develop such a system," they wrote. "In this time of tight budgets and increased public scrutiny of government spending, it is crucial that data about farm payments be as transparent as possible."

Last month, J.B. Penn, Under Secretary for Farm and Foregin Agricultural Services, wrote the senators that the database, with 217 gigabytes of data and 352 million records, was done.

"We've been working on this on and off for most of last year," Deputy Under Secretary Floyd Gaibler told Agriculture Online this week.

The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition hopes that the new database will help USDA find violations of existing payment limits, said Ferd Hoefner of the Coalition. While some payments, such as those paid with commodity certificates, are not capped, direct and countercyclical payments are.

Hoefner's group urged USDA to use the data for more vigorous enforcement, pointing out in a statement that "over the years, reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, USDA Office of Inspector General, and outside groups have detailed a lack of aggressive oversight and enforcement activity. The new database should now be used to help pinpoint cases that deserve further investigation."

Gaibler said he's not certain that the database really will turn up a lot of payment limit violations and that the 2002 Farm Bill didn't mandate how the database should be used.

"It's important to note that the statute references the Secretary to establish these procedures," Gaibler said.

Gaibler said USDA is working hard to make the database available to the public.

Ken Cook of Environmental Working Group, which has already posted 10 years of data on payments made to most individual farmers, told Agriculture Online that his group was the first to request the data from USDA.

The Group will post the new data as soon as possible he said, but probably won't merge it with the older reports, partly because it's likely to go back only two to three years.

"My guess is that when we get it, well put it out separately," he told Agriculture Online.

It should provide more information about large payments reported by such businesses as the cooperative, Riceland Foods, in Stuttgart, Arkansas.

Between 1995 and 2004, it received $533.8 million in subsidies, which were passed on to its farmer members. The co-op has resisted releasing the names and amounts on its own. Out of the total reported, $466.8 million were for commodity certificates, which are not subject to payment limitations, Cook pointed out.

Whether or not the new database changes the way USDA enforces limits, Gaibler, Cook and others agree that the new information on who gets payments will add to the debate about how the next farm bill should deal with the size of subsidies given to individual farmers.