It continues the United States' long history of agricultural subsidies as well as pursuing areas such as energy, conservation, nutrition, and rural development.

[2] (Public Law No: 112-240) The "fiscal cliff" deal was primarily enacted to avoid automatic tax hikes and spending cuts, but also included provisions extending portions of the 2008 Farm Bill for nine months through September 30, 2013.

[3] One version of this legislation, the Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act of 2007 was passed by the United States House of Representatives on July 27, 2007.

[4][5] In late April 2008, congressional negotiators finally reached a deal to reconcile the House and Senate bills.

[11][12] A similar situation occurred in 2005 with the Deficit Reduction Act, where in the enrolling process certain mistakes were made changing the text of the bill.

The bill itself did not cause such an increase if using a "baseline", which is an estimate of future revenue and spending levels of the U.S. government, that was issued in 2007.

[citation needed] In regard to farm regulation, this Act focused on adjusting payment levels and eligibility requirements while bringing forth a new Average Crop Revenue Election program.

This involved improving, maintaining, and managing conservation practices that already exist and also taking part in extra activities.

On April 29, 2008, the Farm Bill contained three major components: Section 9003 of the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 provided for grants covering up to 30% of the cost of developing and building demonstration-scale biorefineries for producing "advanced biofuels", which essentially includes all fuels that are not produced from corn kernel starch.

It also allows for loan guarantees of up to $250 million for building commercial-scale biorefineries to produce advanced biofuels.

The more crop-oriented measures include Section 9010 of the bill, which allowed the CCC to buy sugar from U.S. producers and sell it to bioenergy producers, and Section 9011, which creates the Biomass Crop Assistance Program to support the establishment and production of biomass crops.

While many of the awards typically go towards more energy-efficient grain dryers, the USDA notes that a farm in Iowa will use its grant to replace a propane heating system with a geothermal heating system, while a firm in Louisiana will purchase energy-efficient electric motors for an irrigation well.

[24] With the extra nutrition title funding, it appropriates $4 million to establish a pilot program in many different schools in several states.

[26] Because of its continued refusal to conform to WTO guidelines, the United States was the target of up to $4 billion of potential trade sanctions by Brazil.

Some of the money could have been used to feed poor children who were suffering in other countries but instead farmers in the United States, whom the bill was supposedly designed to assist, were largely flourishing.

Only about one percent of the bill's total cost was sent abroad to provide a relatively small amount of food relief to those in need.

Billions of dollars in subsidies were distributed to these farmers no matter how much they grow, the groups said, and lawmakers failed to help the people in need.

[31] A major factor and controversial issue involved in the act included the amount of payments the farmers were receiving.

So in order to prevent this, certain laws were enacted within the act that reduced this problem so that large operations would be less likely to try and game the system and collect high amounts of direct payments.

The only real requirement for being able to receive these program payments is to be actively engaged in farming, contributing capital, land, or machinery, and providing labor/management.