News coverage of the House-passed farm reauthorization bill has focused on the Republicans’ unprecedented step of jettisoning the food stamp program, in the process ending 35 years of bipartisan cooperation on food and farm legislation and raising questions about the future for millions of children and elderly who depend on nutrition policies.

Lost in the furor is something equally disturbing: The legislation that emerged from the bitter floor fight Thursday is an utterly partisan bill totally out of step with the economic, health, and environmental challenges facing the nation, especially rural America. It is crucial to understand how the House Republican leadership, by caving in to the extreme right wing of the party, has shortchanged the public and America’s small farmers.

Right now, our food and farm policy stands at a crossroads. Farmers are struggling to cope with extreme weather. Consumers are increasingly demanding healthier food, produced in safer and more sustainable ways, creating challenges but also new opportunities. Renewable energy -- such as wind, solar, and advanced biofuels -- offers farmers new markets and could inject much-needed cash and jobs into rural America. And the depopulation of small towns and the countryside has reached a worrisome tipping point.

Yet, the House version of the farm bill simply turns its back on these challenges and opportunities, kowtowing instead to industry demands and launching an ideological assault on basic health and environmental protections.

To start with, the bill takes aim at the environment by first crippling, and then outright ending, conservation programs, as well as zeroing out mandatory funding for rural renewable energy and efficiency development. Thousands of farmers from every state have participated in these programs, generating income while helping restore wetlands and prairies, reducing fertilizer and pesticide pollution that poison our rivers and drinking water, and decreasing the nation’s reliance on polluting fossil fuels.

In stark contrast, the bill would make permanent billions of dollars in subsidies for corporate farmers. This would upend decades of precedent and lock taxpayers into these high costs, at least creating a deterrent to regular updating and improving of our farm policies, and at worst threatening the continuation of important policies to protect soil, water, wildlife, and public health. This is a curious decision by a party clamoring for deficit cuts and reform.

This targeting of conservation programs is a doubly harmful move considering they provide the very tools farmers need most to help combat the ravages of extreme weather driven by climate change.

In gutting these popular, successful programs, the GOP was just getting warmed up. The House bill also takes aim at our bedrock environmental laws by shielding pesticide manufactures from oversight, overturning rules against spraying pesticides directly into lakes and streams, and more.

Finally, the bill includes a stunning provision that would bar states from enacting their own food and farm laws. This hidden attack on state rights could invalidate more than 150 state laws, threatening health, animal welfare, and food safety.

The fact is that House leadership chose a partisan path designed to appease its base instead of producing something that might at least begin to reform our nation’s food and agriculture policies to meet today’s challenges. Rather, they made costly subsidies permanent, ignored the plight of rural economies, unwound decades of work to provide farmers with tools to preserve our nation’s soil, water, and natural landscapes, and undermined public health.

Leadership sold all this as a gambit to broker a deal with the Senate, which passed a comprehensive bipartisan bill. Do not be fooled. This blatantly political move reveals in stark terms the true priorities of House Republican leadership when it comes to protecting the health and welfare of Americans. The House bill should be plowed under like the fertilizer it is.