WASHINGTON -- At the height of the U.S. Senate debate on a new farm bill, Sen. Ron Johnson offered a motion to sever the food stamps section from the rest of the bill and have a separate vote on each piece.

“This isn’t a farm bill. This is a welfare bill,” Johnson, R-Oshkosh, decried in explaining the motive behind his motion.

“This bill is a great example of what’s wrong in Washington,” the freshman senator continued. “Decades ago someone realized that combining food stamps and agriculture programs together in one bill is a great way to pass both with a minimum of debate and controversy.”

Johnson’s motion went down, 59-40, with six Republicans crossing over. The Senate later passed a bill on a bipartisan 64-35 vote that would spend nearly $1 trillion over 10 years on price support and crop insurance programs and food stamps, now officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The debate and controversy has not been minimized. It has shifted to the House of Representatives where a farm bill approved by the Agriculture Committee has stalled largely because of disagreements over cuts to the food stamp program.

The Senate bill would reduce SNAP funding by $4.5 billion. The House Agriculture Committee bill calls for $16 billion in SNAP cuts. House Republican leaders have declined to bring the bill to the floor for a vote because they feel there are not enough votes even within their own ranks for passage.

Conservative Republicans feel the SNAP cuts are not deep enough. Democrats counter they go too far. As a result of the impasse, the House likely will settle for an extension of the current bill that expires on Sept. 30.

Meanwhile, farm-state lawmakers, agriculture groups and food and nutrition groups are clamoring for Congress to pass a new five-year bill, not an extension of the current bill, that would provide certainty about what they can expect in the future.

“An extension is something we lobbied hard against, because it obviously doesn’t include the improved provisions” that are in both the House and Senate bills, said Bill Bruins, president of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation.

The food stamps funding has become an issue “this time around because of the wild increases in the cost of SNAP over the past few years,” Bruins said. “But historically, it’s been a plus for farmers and agriculture to have had food nutrition” included in the farm bill.

The cost of SNAP relative to the rest of the farm bill is what Johnson took issue with in proposing his motion.

“Nearly 80 percent of the spending in this bill, a little under $800 billion, is for food stamps,” Johnson said. “If senators want to spend $800 billion on food stamps, or nearly $200 billion on farm programs, let them say that with a clean vote instead of combining them into an all-or-nothing package.”

Similar arguments have been made by House members who want to decouple SNAP from agriculture and conservation programs.

“For decades, an unholy Washington alliance -- between rural lawmakers and their urban and suburban colleagues -- has caused exponential growth in spending by combining farm policy and food stamps in one huge legislative package,” wrote Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., and Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in a recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed article.

Stutzman, a member of the House Agriculture Committee, voted against the farm bill because for one, he said, the SNAP cuts were not large enough.

Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Sherwood, who also sits on the agriculture committee, voted for the bill even though he said he agrees SNAP funding needs to be reeled in.

“I still struggle with the cost of SNAP because I think that the economy has improved,” Ribble said, departing from the message of most Republican leaders, including the presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, in this campaign season.

Ribble said the dispute over food stamps is just one of the disagreements blocking passage of the farm bill. He cited regional differences and urban-rural conflicts as additional factors. But he agreed with the idea of removing SNAP from the farm bill.

“It’s a good idea to separate them,” Ribble said, “because SNAP has become so large.”

Rep. Tom Petri, R-Fond du Lac, said given the urgent need to pass a bill he “would not oppose separating the SNAP and farm portions of the legislation in order to move both debates forward.”

Other lawmakers in the Wisconsin delegation and across the country, along with advocates for the poor, view the proposed SNAP cuts and the debate over severing the program from the farm bill as another example of attempts to deal with the nation’s deficit by cutting programs for the poor.

“They want to isolate SNAP so it would be vulnerable to not passing and really throw poor people under the bus,” said Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee.

Rep. Ron Kind, D-LaCrosse, said separating SNAP would lose the support of urban lawmakers for the agriculture provisions in the farm bill. He said Johnson misses the historic relationship between urban and rural members of Congress when it comes to the farm bill.

“Sen. Johnson is new and hasn’t been around for previous farm bill debates,” Kind said.

Without commenting on the debate over whether SNAP and the rest of the farm bill should be voted on separately, Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Weston, said farmers in his district were “looking for certainty in the marketplace so they can do the necessary long-term planning to expand and create jobs. I’m pushing leadership for an equitable long-term farm bill that enables continued agricultural prosperity in a fiscally responsible manner.”

Despite the disagreements over SNAP, lawmakers stand together on the need for some action before the farm bill expires in two weeks.

A bipartisan group of senators and House members, including Sen. Herb Kohl, D- Milwaukee, Ribble, Petri, Kind, Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Weston, and Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, a U.S. Senate candidate, signed a letter Thursday urging leaders to back a temporary fix of the dairy safety net called the Milk Income Loss Contract.

Parts of the MILC changed on Sept. 1, calling for reduced compensation to dairy farmers struggling under low milk prices and high overhead costs.

While critics complain about the steep rise in SNAP spending in recent years, food and nutrition advocates and anti-poverty groups say there’s a very simple reason for such growth: the need is greater.

“SNAP, like unemployment compensation, is supposed to grow when times are hard,” said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center. “The program is doing what it was intended to do.”

The Congressional Budget Office reported in April the number of people receiving SNAP benefits increased by 70 percent between 2007, the start of the recession, and 2011. SNAP spending grew by 135 percent during that period. On average, nearly 45 million people, or one in seven Americans, a month received SNAP benefits in 2011.

“The number of people eligible for and receiving benefits between 2007 and 2011 has been driven primarily by the weak economy,” the CBO said.

In Wisconsin, SNAP provided about $1 billion in benefits to an average of 715,213 people a month in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The department estimates that every $5 of SNAP benefits generates $9 in local economic activity.

With the national poverty rate at an all-time high of 15 percent, according to just released census figures, the need for food stamps is likely to be around for a while.

Bonnie Bellehumeur, executive director of Feeding America Eastern Wisconsin, has experienced the demand first hand.

“We’ve seen an 80 percent increase over the last five years in our distribution of food,” said Bellehumeur, adding that the amount of food her organization has dished out increased to 18.5 million pounds a year from 10.2 million pounds a year.

Cutting the SNAP budget, Bellehumeur said, would drive up demand for her group’s services.

“Our feeling is any cuts to food stamps is going to be devastating to the people who are still struggling,” she said. “The need doesn’t go away. They’re just going to be turning more to emergency food programs, and that means a need for our services are going to increase.”

An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded the House Agriculture Committee’s farm bill would eliminate benefits for two to three million people, mostly low-income working people with children and seniors.