Associated PressAssociated Press

The Bush administration's farm proposal mistakenly assumes farm prices will stay high, Agriculture Commissioner Roger Johnson says.

"Farmers know - everybody knows -that prices will come down; it's simply a question of when," Johnson said in a statement Wednesday.

The administration proposes, among other things, to reduce spending on loan programs, which are viewed as more vulnerable to trade challenges, and boost direct payments.

"These payments have no relation to either production or prices," Johnson's statement said. "They result in increasingly high land prices, but do little to protect farmers when production or prices decline."

Johnson said he does support federal Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns' focus on payment limits and help for beginning farmers.

"It will be very difficult to get this through Congress," Johnson said of the payment limits, "but it is something I believe is essential to maintaining public trust in the farm program."

Johnson, a Democrat who is president-elect of the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, said he would reserve judgment on the administration proposal for countercyclical crop insurance program based on revenue. He said it could be difficult to administer and it would be hard to replace disaster aid.

The state's congressional delegation also had reservations.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., called the Bush plan "the good, the bad and the ugly." He applauded increased ethanol funding but criticized the other ideas.

"The president's policies would put us right back to where we were in the late 1990s, when American agriculture was failing," Conrad said.

Sen. Byron Dorgan and Rep. Earl Pomeroy, both Democrats, said they would like to see more of a safety net.

"You do not want to build a farm bill on the premise of strong prices with programs just designed to help farmers during the good times," Pomeroy said. "You build a farm bill to provide a stable safety net and to step in to help producers when times are bad."

The North Dakota Farmers Union issued a statement saying the Bush proposals shows promise but still falls short. "A better policy could be designed to factor in production costs to account for sharp spikes in the price of inputs such as fuel and fertilizer," the group's president, Robert Carlson, said.