People seem to pass certain milestones on the road of financial desperation. First the unpaid bills pile up. Then the bank forecloses. Finally, they reach the end of the line: bankruptcy court.

But now policy makers are talking about redrawing this map by putting the bankruptcy court before foreclosure to give people a chance to keep their homes.

It has been done before, on a relatively small scale and with some success. In the midst of the farm crisis during the 1980s, Congress gave bankruptcy judges the power to reduce onerous farm loans to reflect a steep drop in land prices.

The Obama administration and Congressional Democrats are pushing a similar idea to stem the swelling tide of home foreclosure. Yet a close look at the farm experience raises questions about how widespread any relief would be.

While the creation of a special bankruptcy workout for farmers, known as Chapter 12, helped resolve that earlier crisis, many farmers still lost their farms or had to scale them back, according to judges and lawyers who studied the effects.