Page 6 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

That’s not to say that previous farm bills – beginning with the Agricultural Adjustment Act
(AAA) of 1933 – had any less drama and lacked political intrigue. After all, in the midst of the
Great Depression, congressmen wanted to quickly pass a bill to “Relieve the existing National
Economic Emergency by increasing agricultural purchasing power,” as they noted at the start of
their legislative text.

During the depths of the Depression, farmers kept producing, but no one was buying because
they had no money. Prices for cattle, hogs and many other commodities dropped dramatically. In
an effort to reduce agricultural surpluses, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the AAA
bill that paid farmers to cut back production – sometimes by killing and burying calves and baby
pigs as part of “emergency livestock reductions.”

Since there was so little demand for pork,
Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace said farmers
couldn't run an “old folks home for hogs and keep
them around indefinitely as pets.”

In Nebraska alone, the government bought about
470,000 head of cattle and 438,000 pigs.
Nationwide, 6 million hogs were purchased from
desperate farmers, according to the Wessels Living
History Farm in York, Nebraska.

In the South, 1 million farmers were paid to plow
under 10.4 million acres of cotton, which was
trading at a paltry 6 cents a pound. Wheat was
selling at 35 cents a bushel, corn at 15 cents and
some farmers were selling hogs at 3 cents a pound.
Eventually, Wallace worked to turn those surplus
agricultural products into food for hundreds of
thousands of hungry U.S. citizens. He pledged that
the government would purchase agricultural
products “from those who have too much in order
to give to those who have too little.” The AAA was
amended to set up the Federal Surplus Relief
Corporation (FSRC), which distributed agricultural products such as canned beef, apples, beans
and pork products to relief organizations. The policy connection between food producers and
hungry consumers was officially launched. It’s a give and take that serves both constituencies
well.

Of course, farmers at that time were perceived as that much more important politically because
they made up almost 5 percent of the relatively small U.S. population by 1935. Roosevelt could
easily connect the importance of farms to the cities and built political support from both:

“If the farm population of the United States suffers and loses its purchasing power, the
people in the cities in every part of the country suffer of necessity with it. One of the

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