“We would have much preferred they pass the House bill,” said Michael Held, the chief executive of the South Dakota Farm Bureau. “I think the attitude here is this is typical Washington, D.C., not getting its work done.”

With a quarter of the country experiencing an exceptionally severe drought that is expected only to deepen, with the government projecting that much of the spring’s record corn planting will wither away, with significant damage to soybean and wheat crops and with prices for feed at record levels, farmers and ranchers are increasingly anxious about the gridlock in Washington.

“I am tired of our leaders doing nothing,” Mr. Askew said.

President Obama will begin a tour of this drought-hit state on Monday, an unusual amount of attention that underscores Iowa’s swing-state status. Mitt Romney visited Des Moines last week and addressed the drought.

While the most recently enacted farm bill will not expire until next month, disaster relief that would have helped some livestock producers cope with the high costs of feed and fodder lapsed last week. And with big disagreements in Congress over proposals to overhaul insurance and other provisions, farmers are finding it difficult to plan for any recovery in the next growing season.

Farm policy bills, which typically come up for renewal every five years, are usually built to attract bipartisan support by combining subsidies for farmers with allotments for food stamps and other nutrition programs that appeal to urban lawmakers.

But in a dynamic that has roiled the 112th Congress, this year’s farm bill was unlike any before it. While the House Agriculture Committee signed off on a measure, its substantial cuts to food programs alienated too many Democrats. And its cuts to those programs, as well as to some forms of farm aid, were not enough to appease the chamber’s most conservative members.

Republican leaders were unable to muster enough support for even a one-year extension of the law and instead passed a short-term drought-relief measure, the first time the House has failed to bring its own farm bill to the floor. The Senate, which had passed its own version by a healthy bipartisan margin, declined to take up the short-term House bill, and Congress left town in a stalemate.