Page 73 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

later, President Richard Nixon convened the first White House Conference on Food, Nutrition
and Health.

In a speech opening the conference, Nixon said the event was an “historic milestone” that “set
the seal of urgency on our national commitment to put an end to hunger and malnutrition due to
poverty in America. At the same time, it marks the beginning of a new, more determined and
more concerted drive than ever before, to reduce the malnutrition that derives from ignorance or
inadvertence.”

Nixon went on to say that the food stamp program – as it then existed – was “shot through with
inequities, notably, that many counties have not participated, and the fact that because food
stamps had to be bought with cash, many of the neediest were unable to participate.” (At the
time, food stamp recipients had to pay a fee to get the benefits, a requirement that would last
until the 1977 farm bill.)

Four years later, with Congress due to write a new farm bill, lawmakers
took the decisive and historic step of marrying food stamps with the
farm bill. In part, joining nutrition assistance with farm programs just
made logical sense, but there was also a political motive – to ensure
broader support for farm bills, said Marshall Matz, who at the time was
an aide to the Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human
Needs, which had been formed in 1968.

The 1973 farm bill required states to expand the food stamp program to
every political jurisdiction in the country by July 1974. The bill also
expanded the program to drug addicts and alcoholics, set up a process
for adjusting allotments on a semi-annual basis and required the
Marshall Matz department to establish temporary eligibility standards for disasters.
A 2016 study of adults whose families were on food stamps during the
1960s and early 1970s turned out to be significantly healthier in middle age than children of low-
income families who didn't participate in the program during that period when it not yet been
implemented nationwide.

Dole, who had been elected to the Senate in 1968, said the idea of putting the food stamp
program in the farm bill had been kicking around for several years, but it became more urgent as
farm-state lawmakers worried that the urbanization of America was making it more and more
difficult to pass farm bills in the House. In 1950, 36 percent of Americans still lived in rural
areas. By 1970, the rural share of the population had fallen to 26 percent.

“We could pass it through the Senate because almost every senator represented
farmers,” Dole said in an interview with Agri-Pulse. “When you got to the House you had so
many city representatives, whether it’s New York or L.A. or any big city,” and for many of them,
voting against the farm bill was “their one conservative vote,” Dole said.

“We needed both programs, so why not put them together? …. Sometimes you do things to get
things done, and this was done on a bipartisan basis.”

The marriage of farm programs and food stamps would pay off big when the farm bill came up
for renewal in 1977. Dole would play a critical role, too, as a Republican farm-state champion of
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