The U.S. Senate on Thursday completed a five-year, half-trillion-dollar farm bill that cuts farm subsidies and land conservation spending by about $2 billion a year but protects sugar growers and 46 million food stamp beneficiaries.

While transforming farm subsidy programs, the Senate left intact the sugar program that for 80 years has protected beet and sugarcane growers by controlling prices and limiting imports.

Ric Rodriguez, a Heart Mountain sugar beet grower who also is vice president of the Western Sugar Cooperative board of directors, said Monday he’s satisfied with the farm bill’s progress but sugar growers are prepared to fight again as the House of Representatives takes it on.

“It sounds like we got everything that we asked for,” Rodriguez said, but he foresees “some hurdles still.”

“We’re anticipating some attacks again in the House,” Rodriguez said, from consumer groups and food and beverage companies that use sugar, who oppose the program because they say it drives up costs and leads to confectioners relocating overseas. Amendments to phase out or narrow the scope of the sugar program failed on close votes.

Last week’s 64-35 Senate vote for passage defied political odds. Many inside Congress had predicted that legislation so expensive and complicated would have little chance of advancing in an election year.

The bipartisanship seen in the Senate may be less evident in the House, where conservatives are certain to resist the bill’s costs, particularly for food stamps. Food stamp spending has doubled in the past five years, and beneficiaries have grown from 20 million to 46 million. The program’s budget is now about $80 billion a year, or 80 percent of spending in the farm bill.

Farm bills traditionally have been bipartisan efforts, and leaders of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee leaders made a point of showing how their bill would bring down the deficit.

Senate leaders said the bill would save $23 billion over 10 years, replacing four commodity subsidy programs with one, consolidating 23 conservation programs into 13 and ending food stamp abuse in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The biggest change is eliminating direct payments to farmers whether they plant crops or not. The program costs about $5 billion a year. Local Farm Service Agency officials have said these payments don’t generally apply to Big Horn Basin farmers.

More farmers may rely on crop insurance and a new program to cover smaller losses on planted crops before crop insurance kicks in. Farm Bureau Insurance agent Larry French said it’s too early to tell how local growers may be affected by crop insurance changes.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know” because the House could come up with a totally different version from the Senate, which “kept crop insurance pretty well intact.”

Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said despite differences between the House and Senate approaches, “I hope my colleagues are encouraged by this success.” His committee is scheduled to meet July 11 to vote on a House version of the bill.

The Senate considered more than 70 amendments over three days, including a measure to reduce by 15 percentage points the share of crop insurance premiums the government pays for farmers with adjusted gross incomes of more than $750,000.

The government pays an average 62 percent of crop insurance premiums, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the crop insurance costs will be nearly $10 billion a year over the next 10 years.

(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)