Whether it was Western cussedness, fiscal conservatism or the fact that so much of both those states is either desert or federally owned land, the congressional delegations from the Beehive State and the Grand Canyon State were the only ones to cast a majority of their votes against the monstrous 2008 farm bill.

The much-deserved veto that President Bush issued Wednesday, overridden in barely a day, wouldn't even have been necessary if enough senators and representatives from the other 48 had the smarts or the guts to end 75 years of taxpayer subsidies that these days go to an increasingly smaller number of increasingly wealthy landowners for raising crops that we alternately have far too much of or pay far too much for.

Of course, if the subsidies had been all that there was to vote on, then Utah Sen. Bob Bennett and Reps. Jim Matheson and Chris Cannon wouldn't have been so lonely in their brave opposition to the $300 billion bill.

Chances are that, instead of backing the bill, the other Utahns in the Capitol - Sen. Orrin Hatch and Rep. Rob Bishop - would have joined them and much of the rest of Congress in shooting down a measure that authorizes at least $40 billion in crop subsidies over the next five years.

Utah's 3-2 vote against the farm bill was reflected only in Arizona, where the House delegation split 4-4, Sen. Jon Kyl voted no and Sen. John McCain, though he missed the vote, made it clear that if he were president, he'd veto the bill, too.

In four other states - New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Wisconsin - the yeas and nays canceled each other out.

The House and Senate quickly voted to override Bush's veto. But the version that he vetoed was missing 34 pages on international food aid and trade. That will require Congress to send another bill to Bush after the holiday.

The obsolete subsidy package survives because clever agribusiness interests are able to color the bill with good feelings and surround it with a bodyguard of pork. Two-thirds of the money, after all, is not aid to agribusiness but assistance to the poor, difficult for most politicians to oppose, especially when food prices are rising.

The other presidential candidates, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, also were absent for the vote, but made positive statements about how necessary the increased aid is for the poor.

For those who wanted more, there were millions allocated to good ideas - cleaning up Chesapeake Bay and encouraging schools to serve more fresh fruits and vegetables - and bad - steps to artificially inflate the price of sugar and to increase tax breaks for people who raise thoroughbred horses.

It has been a long time indeed since the bulk of farm subsidies went to anything resembling a family farm. By encouraging the overproduction of staple crops, subsidies have pushed American farmers to glut the world market with their increasingly chemical-dependent commodities, allowing them to sell at prices below the cost of production and make up the difference out of the taxpayers' till.

Those who were best at farming the government as well as the land got bigger, bought out their neighbors, bought machines, hired help and, in a great many cases, either moved to town or left their land - and their government checks - to kin who already had.

The worst insult this year is that enlarged subsidies have been approved just when the farmers who get them, the big ones, need them the least. The growing demand for corn for ethanol fuels has combined with other factors to drive up the price of grains to record levels.

These levels will set the standard for subsidies over the next five years, so that even if prices return to "normal," they will trigger higher subsidy payments because they fell below the newly, and foolishly, set 2008 benchmark. That little glitch is one reason why officials and the media can't decide how much money the bill will really cost. The $289 billion penciled out by Congress is likely to grow to at least $300 billion.

Even as this bill becomes law, there are many other agricultural issues left to be addressed. Most of them deal with the shameful lack of anti-trust laws in the food sector and the polluting and unsustainable industrialization of meat production. And the whole universe of farm legislation will be back before Congress in five years.

By then, perhaps, more states may be ready to follow the lead of two relatively small Southwestern states in crafting a farm bill that encourages the production of healthy food, not sickening deficits.

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* GEORGE PYLE, a former Salt Lake Tribune editorial writer, is the author of Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food. He is now an editorial writer for The Buffalo News.