While big businesses ranging from insurance giants to banks, car companies, investment houses, and construction firms are raking in hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars, the men and women who feed and clothe the country received some unwelcome news yesterday from President Barack Obama.

In the President's proposed budget, farmers with more than $500,000 in gross sales were told they would no longer be eligible to receive a chunk of the farm bill's safety net...

Open any major newspaper in the country and you'll find countless stories of economic distress. Companies are shedding jobs, house foreclosures are on the rise, and the Dow plunges to new lows almost every day.

But there's one story that's hardly been told—a story that has a direct impact on the breakfast you likely enjoy while skimming the day's headlines.

Farmers are still reeling from higher than normal input costs, but the prices they get for their crops are dropping like a rock. Nowhere is this more prevalent than down on the dairy farm.

The price farmers get for bottled milk has plummeted by 50% since last winter, with prices dropping 40 cents per gallon in the past month alone, according to the National Milk Producers Federation. But the cost of making milk has remained high...

Although farm families across the country were put on notice last summer that strict new payment limitation rules were coming down the pike for the 2009 crop year, nobody could have anticipated the drastic changes that materialized nearly a half a year later, leaving farm families scrambling to understand and comply with the new rules.

The 2008 farm bill radically reformed payment limitations by requiring that all payments be traced to a warm body, that the total amount of benefit be cut in half through elimination of the so-called triple entity rule, and that the total amount of adjusted gross income a person could have and still receive benefits be cut by as much as 80%...