The farm bill is not just for farmers anymore.

Union officials, immigration advocates and energy lobbyists are all eyeing the $280 billion agriculture bill, which the Senate began debating Monday. As perhaps the last major policy bill moving this year, groups with little interest in cattle or crops may end up playing a role in what Congress makes of the nation’s farm policy.

Many of those hopes reside in a bill sponsored by Sens. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) that is expected to be offered as an amendment on the floor.

The White House has joined critics who say the Senate Agriculture Committee’s farm bill does not go far enough in reforming the current subsidy structure. Acting Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner issued a veto threat against the legislation in a press call to reporters on Monday. (See also The Hill’s interview with Conner, P 20.)

The bill “contains little real reform” and relies on tax increases and “budget gimmicks” to meet pay-as-you-go budgetary rules, Conner said.

He said the Senate bill would largely perpetuate a system that pays farm owners who don’t need help. Conner said he would recommend that President Bush veto the bill as now written, but also added that he believed it could still be improved to “reflect good farm and good fiscal policy.”

Other groups were preparing for a potential floor battle over who harvests America’s crops.

Craig Regelbrugge, co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, will be keeping a close eye on the debate. Regelbrugge’s coalition, consisting of more than 300 agricultural associations, had hoped that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) would offer her AgJobs bill as a provision to the legislation.

Feinstein’s measure would provide temporary visas, known as H-2As, to the country’s unauthorized agricultural workers. Regelbrugge estimates undocumented laborers comprise 99 percent of the workforce. One of every six workers is new to the job each year, he said.

“There is a need to stabilize the labor force with a reformed guest worker program,” Regelbrugge said. Harvests from Northern California’s pear crop to Michigan’s asparagus take have suffered this year because of worker shortages caused by the backlash against illegal immigrants, Regelbrugge said.  

But Feinstein announced late Monday that she would not introduce AgJobs as an amendment to the farm bill.

In preparation for the Senate vote, Regelbrugge has been working with newspaper editorial boards to garner support for Feinstein’s bill. The group’s website also asks visitors to petition Congress in support.  

Had Feinstein offered her bill as an amendment, both Regelbrugge and Jenks expected there would have been opposition from Republicans, most likely from Sen. Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), the GOP ranking member on the Senate’s Agriculture panel.

The Georgia senator has offered competing legislation in the past to Feinstein’s effort that would limit the workers’ stay to 10 months of the year, requiring them to return for the other two.  

America’s largest union, meanwhile, has also taken a more active role in the farm bill debate. The AFL-CIO wrote in late October to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, urging the Senate bill to expand country-of-origin requirements to perishables like meat, seafood and vegetables in addition to processed foods.

“Looking at this from a consumer’s point of view, you would like to know where it came from,” said Brett Gibson, legislative representative with the AFL-CIO. “It is not a difficult thing to do.”

The AFL-CIO argued that safety measures must keep pace with the rising imports of processed foods. The union’s letter cited reports from January and March of this year by the Food and Drug Administration that found shipments of Hershey’s Kisses, believed to be contaminated by salmonella, were refused entry at the border with Mexico.

Harkin also received a letter from the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), an AFL-CIO affiliate. The union’s letter brings up a June 2007 Consumers Union poll in which 92 percent of Americans said they wanted to know where their food was produced.

U.S. food manufacturers have continued to shift operations to low-wage countries, the union said.

“Thousands of BCTGM members are losing their jobs as a result of this shift in production,” reads the letter.

Both letters asked Harkin to fold a bill by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) into farm policy that requires origin labeling for processed foods. But Brown’s language did not make into the bill, according to Gibson.

The Ohio Democrat is not expected to offer it as an amendment to the farm bill either, according to one of his aides.

Gibson hopes to build a coalition of consumer advocacy groups and family farm organizations to push for Brown’s bill once the Senate finishes with farm legislation.

Others have had more success. A new group is trying to win federal support for turning coal into a transportation fuel. The Coal-To-Liquids Coalition, an industry group tied to the National Mining Association, has sought an extension for a 50 cent per gallon tax credit for coal-to-liquids (CTL) developers. The credit was in a Senate energy tax package that was defeated earlier this year.

“It was a manner of finding another vehicle and relying on our Senate allies,” said Corey Henry, a spokesman for the coalition.

The coalition turned to the farm bill instead. Sens. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) successfully pushed to attach the credit extension to 2010. To get the tax break, CTL developers will have to capture 50 percent of the carbon they produce, a nod to concerns about carbon dioxide’s contribution to global warming.

Henry said developers aim to extend the credit to 2020. But Henry said he expects the farm bill’s passage will help the burgeoning industry.

“It should start to help freeing up capital to build up these plants,” he said.

Other new fuels could also end up getting a big boost in the farm bill. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) may offer the renewable fuels standard, or RFS, that the Senate passed as part of energy legislation to the ag measure, said Republican committee spokesman Matt Letourneau.

The RFS would require the production of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. Coal-to-liquids would not count toward that target under the version adopted by the Senate in the energy bill.

Letourneau said Domenici considered the RFS as perhaps the most important piece of the energy bill, but he said the senator doubted whether the bill could move this year.

Corn growers, Wall Street investment firms and ethanol producers favor an aggressive RFS. But a broad coalition of groups, from oil and gas companies to livestock groups that worry an RFS would further drive up feed prices, have lobbied to moderate the new fuels mandate.

Jim Snyder contributed to this story.