U.S. agriculture's rocky road over the last five years is only going to get rougher as the experiment to move farm income from "government-backed" to market-driven gathers steam.

That was the message to Louisiana farmers from one of the nation's leading ag economists at the 79th Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation's annual convention in New Orleans in June.

"The highs will be higher and the lows, lower," Dr. Abner Womack, with Texas A&Ms Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute, told more than 400 farmers attending the Farm Bureau's Farm Policy Conference. He estimated it will take about $11 billion a year in government underpinning to keep agriculture stable.

Those "highs and lows" were the prices farmers can expect for their crops in coming years and the prospects for farming in general.

Womack leads a consortium of economists from seven major agriculture universities who have been charged by Congress to come up with the justifications for the dollar figures for a new Farm Bill, the long-term policy law that guides U.S. farming and agricultural policy.

The largely failed experiment to completely revamp U.S. farm policy, unchanged since the 1930s, was embodied in the 1996 Farm Bill. In that legislation, Congress began to wean farmers from government payments and installed a pure market-driven basis for farmer income.

Under the program farmers could plant anything they wanted in whatever quantities they wanted, but they got paid whatever world farm prices dictated when they harvested. As a result, the federal government has had to jump in every year since 1996 with billions of dollars annually to keep the farm economy from collapsing.

Two of the major provisions of Womack's draft legislation make soybeans, for the first time, eligible for government support and allows farmers to select how many acres of which crops qualify for program eligibility.

"We are moving into a new era," Womack said. "We are going to see wider price swings (in crop prices) than ever before."

Overall, prices are going to continue to trend lower, here and around the world. But he said he is confident U.S. technology, particularly the ability to engineer new and better crops, will keep the country ahead of the competition.

The draft proposals he and his team members will be presenting to Congress in the coming weeks will assist farmers during wild price gyrations. But the new proposals will not make them whole. Pre-1996 farm policy told farmers what and how much to plant and how much they would be paid for their harvest. Womack predicted the new farm bill will continue to help farmers over the rough spots when weather and world events turn against them, but the new provisions are not fail-safe as they were previously, and larger and larger numbers of moderate size family farms will become ever more vulnerable.

Womack said that while his team crunches numbers to demonstrate the outcome of a range of weather and price variables, ultimately their goal is to design programs that will keep American agriculture stable in the face of rapidly expanding and ever tougher competition from foreign agriculture.

Several South American countries will become America's chief rivals, he said.

With vast unplanted spaces in South America, they have the ability to produce crops cheaper and in larger quantities.

But what those countries don't have, Womack said, is the ability to formulate and fund large-scale payment programs when their farmers get "wiped out. Our marketing loan program is a mean hombre. Our competitors can't match us in that," he said.

As U.S. agriculture labors to convince a skeptical Congress and the American public that dollars underwriting farmers are a wise investment, Womack advised the farm community to make it clear that only 10 percent of the dollars involved go to help farmers.

"The remainder of the funding will continue to guarantee the American consumer the cheapest food in the world," he said. The American consumer pays less than 10 percent of take home pay for food, by far the least of any country in the world.

"The funding also will ensure a competitive trade position in the fierce global competition for market share," Womack said. "It also will safeguard environmental and conservation initiatives, provide food reserves to meet unforeseen disasters and keep the hundreds of ancillary businesses that supply the needs of agriculture financially healthy."