President Barack Obama wants a limit on agricultural payments, but Congress doesn't want to go along.

Obama campaigned on a pledge to limit individual farm payments to $250,000. Obama said that would ensure family farms and not "corporate agribusiness" got the money.

But measures to do just that recently died in committee in both the House and the Senate.

In his budget outline, Obama also proposed a different way to limit farm payments. If a farm had more than $500,000 in gross sales, it wouldn't get payments under Obama's plan.

That didn't get anywhere either. Neither the House nor the Senate included it in the budget outlines passed April 3, 2009.

It is possible that farm payments may come up again this year during the appropriations process. But people who follow agriculture policy said the chances for that are remote.

"I think it may be done for the year," said Otto Doering, a public policy specialist on agriculture at Purdue University. Congress passed a major farm bill last year, and revisiting the question of farm payments would be both complicated and controversial, he said.

"The farm bill was passed last year, and no one wants to touch it again," said Liz Friedlander, a spokeswoman with the National Farmers Union, which opposed the limits for farms with more than $500,000 in gross sales. Some farms of that size still struggle to turn a profit and should not be excluded from payments, she said.

As it stands now, the farm bill covers a five-year period and will expire in 2013. Is it possible we haven't heard the last from the Obama administration on farm subsidies? Sure. But given that Congress has rejected Obama's plans for the 2010 budget, we're moving the meter on this one to Stalled.