Agriculture

Agriculture Colonial Era1770s to 1890The “Golden Age” (1890s–1920)Since 1920
Colonial Era Agriculture dominated the colonial economy, and the great majority of the population lived in the countryside. The agricultural practices of colonial farmers often earned the scorn of European contemporary observers, and their reputation fared little better at the hands of later historians. They were portrayed as wasteful and slovenly farmers who abused the land, neglected their livestock, accepted small yields and low incomes, used primitive tools, and resisted useful innovations, preferring customary practices and constrained by the dead hand of tradition. Recently historians have challenged that view for two reasons. First, the denigration of colonial agriculture often arose from an inappropriate comparison with European farmers, who faced a much different situation. In America, where land was relatively cheap and labor costly, following the “best” European practices seldom made sense. Farm practices that appeared wasteful to Old World observers often reflected efforts to save labor in a region of high wages. Second, the critics of colonial farmers often underestimated their impressive accomplishments, most evident in the creation of what might be called a “mestizo” agriculture. At its best, colonial agriculture wove together crops and farming techniques from America, Africa, and Europe to produce a unique system of husbandry more productive than any of its individual sources. American agriculture was mestizo in another, more sinister sense. It combined labor stolen from Africa with land stolen from Native Americans to produce commodities, and sometimes luxuries, for European consumers.

Agricultural Crops and Practices.

Colonial agriculture was strikingly diverse. The plantation districts of the coastal South, where slaves, often working on large units with one hundred or more laborers, produced rice, indigo, and tobacco for export to Europe, differed radically from the southern backcountry and the northern colonies, where small family farms produced a diverse range of products for their own subsistence and small surpluses for export or sale in local markets. Agriculturally, the colonies represent a spectrum ranging from north to south, from farm region to plantation district. While agriculture in the farming regions of the backcountry and northern colonies appears relatively homogeneous, one should distinguish between New England, where thin soils and a short growing season limited the size of surpluses available for export, and the Mid‐Atlantic colonies, where a warmer climate and richer soils yielded much larger crops for export.

By the end of the eighteenth century, wheat cultivation was well established in the Mid‐Atlantic colonies, where it had expanded into the Hudson, Mohawk, Delaware, and Susquehanna river valleys. Plows drawn by oxen or increasingly by horses were in common use. Corn, barley (used in beer making), and oats for feed were raised as well. Sheep were common in New England, and cattle were raised for export in Delaware, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Livestock grazed on English grasses imported and planted for the purpose. Farmers in New England and New York raised flax as a commercial crop.

The plantation South, too, was far from homogeneous, as different principal crops with differing labor and capital requirements led to sharply differing agricultural practices and contrasting social systems and cultures. In the lower South (the coastal portions of Georgia and South Carolina) the major export crops were rice and indigo, plantations were large, planters wealthy, and a majority of the population enslaved. In the upper South colonies of Maryland and Virginia around the Chesapeake Bay, where tobacco was the main crop, plantations were smaller (indeed, much tobacco was grown on family farms), planters less rich, and the slave presence, while still substantial, less overwhelming.

Another source of diversity (and another much‐debated topic among historians) was the degree to which farmers produced surpluses for market, a distinction that tended to reinforce and deepen the plantation‐farm dichotomy. Plantations, especially the largest ones, were highly commercialized, often engaged in single‐crop production, and imported from abroad much of what they needed for consumption. Yet even the largest, most commercialized operations grew some of the food their workers consumed, while even the smallest, most self‐sufficient farms sold some surplus on the market and purchased some consumer goods.

Despite its diversity, all colonial agriculture did share common characteristics. The first was its relatively high productivity, and the high incomes it generated for farm residents, especially in the eighteenth century, when farm prices rose steadily as trade patterns shifted in favor of agriculture. This high productivity had several sources, including colonial farmers' creativity, evident in the mestizo system they created; the abundance and fertility of land; and the hard work of farm families, including farm wives, who often helped in the fields, did dairying and kept a garden, in addition to performing the household work traditionally associated with women. The high productivity and incomes generated by colonial agriculture meant that the free population in rural areas lived quite well by early modern standards, as is evident in their diet and material culture. The quality of the colonial diet is revealed in the height of the population: By the time of the Revolutionary War, American‐born men of European ancestry were, on average, just over 5'8" tall, about 3.5 inches taller than their English counterparts and about the same height as American males who served in the military during World War II.

Further evidence of the vitality of agriculture in the colonial North comes from recent research challenging the conventional wisdom that industrialization in America began in the cities and was imported from England. Recent scholarship points to the domestic origins of America's industrial revolution and argues that agriculture provided the labor force, capital, and much of the expertise that made industrialization possible.

The Plantation Workforce.

Before about 1680, most unfree workers on colonial plantations were indentured servants recruited to the colonies from Britain. In the eighteenth century, most unfree workers were slaves of African ancestry. Initially, high mortality and a shortage of women kept the slave population from reproducing itself, so planters had to rely on continual imports to maintain their workfore. American‐born slaves experienced lower death rates and had a balanced sex ratio, so as the native‐born share of the population rose, the rate of natural population growth increased as well. By the 1720s in the Chesapeake colonies, though much later in the lower South, the colonial slave population was growing by reproduction. When most slaves were African‐born, slaves were largely confined to fieldwork: with the rise of an American‐born slave population, however, the occupations available to slaves diversified, and they took over much of the skilled work on plantations.
See also Colonial Era; Food and Diet; Indentured Servitude; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Livestock Industry; Slavery: The Slave Trade; Slavery: Development and Expansion of Slavery; Tobacco Industry; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

James T. Lemon , The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Pennsylvania, 1976.
Paul G.E. Clemens , The Atlantic Economy and Colonial Maryland's Eastern Shore: From Tobacco to Grain, 1980.
John J. McCusker and and Russell R. Menard , The Economy of British America, 1607–1789, 1985.
Lois Green Carr,, Russell R. Menard,, and and Lorena S. Walsh , Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland, 1991.
Allan Kulikoff , The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, 1992.
Winifred Barr Rothenberg , The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750–1850, 1992.
Joyce E. Chaplin , An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815, 1993.
Daniel Vickers , Farmers and Fishermen: Two Centuries of Work in Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1830, 1994.
Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Volume I: The Colonial Era, 1996.

Russell R. Menard

1770s to 1890 Following the Revolutionary War, the new nation built its economy largely on the marketing of agricultural products. New crops and technologies, plus territorial expansion, fostered agricultural growth in the nineteenth century. The cotton kingdom founded on slavery, developed in the southern United States, producing the era's most important cash crop and principal U.S. export. In the North, the agricultural economy flourished by marketing its grain crops and livestock. The new lands acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War spread the market economy of agriculture to the Pacific Coast, as rivers, canals, and railroads linked farmers, distributors, and consumers. The largest contributor to economic growth in the first half of the nineteenth‐century, antebellum American agriculture was marked by regional distinctions. Cotton characterized the South, and wheat, corn, beef, and pork, the Middle West (and soon the Great Plains). Farmers of the Northeast, with its large urban concentrations, supplied the cities with perishable commodities such as fruit, vegetables, and dairy products.

In the aftermath of the Revolution, it took time to re‐establish domestic commodity markets and open new international ones. The federal government, initially under the Articles of Confederation, promoted an economy built on small family farms. The Land Ordinance of 1785, followed by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, established a system of land distribution and rapid territorial transition to statehood. Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became states as settlers sought out new farmland—a process that would continue throughout the nineteenth century.

Several economic problems beset small farmers, including tight credit, the lack of hard currency, and an inability to pay taxes. In 1786, under the leadership of Daniel Shays, debt‐ridden farmers in western Massachusetts organized militias and closed courts to forestall being penalized for failing to pay bills and taxes. Only military repression ended Shays's Rebellion. Federal taxation spurred a comparable rural rebellion in 1791. Opposed to excise taxes on whiskey, a primary money‐making product, farmers in the Mid‐Atlantic and Upper South regions fueled the Whiskey Rebellion. President George Washington sent federal troops to end the uprising.

Other events in the 1790s, especially the cotton‐gin patent secured by Eli Whitney in 1793, had a more lasting impact. Whitney's relatively simple machine spread the cultivation of short‐staple cotton across the South. By 1860, the region produced as much as 6 million bales of cotton, accounting for two‐thirds of the nation's exports. While the southern states continued to grow tobacco, rice, and sugar cane, and raise livestock, the cotton gin accelerated the spread of the cotton economy, and with it, the expansion of slavery and the plantation system. This, in turn, gave rise to a two‐tier southern agricultural system consisting of a small minority of wealthy plantation owners and a vast majority of slaves and poor white subsistence farmers.

In the North, early–nineteenth–century agriculture was characterized by the production of livestock (sheep, hogs, and cattle) and such grains as wheat and corn. Roads and trails, rivers and canals, and eventually railroads connected farmers to their markets. For the most part, transportation improvements were funded by state, local, or private monies. Except for the National Road, Congress did not fund such improvements in the Antebellum Era. In 1825, the Erie Canal, built by New York State, connected eastern markets with the newer western states and territories. Discovering the dual advantages of available land and cheap transportation, farmers flocked west, often displacing Indian settlements and violating Indian treaty rights in the process. By the 1850s, they were moving as far as California and Oregon. Single men, families, and entire communities migrated west for many reasons, but most went in search of new farmland and new beginnings.

The rapid geographical expansion of agriculture stimulated new farm technology. Farmers quickly discovered that implements that worked in the east failed on midwestern and western soils. Hence the invention of new agricultural implements—including Hiram and John Pitts's threshing machines, John Deere's cast‐iron plows, and Cyrus McCormick's reapers—became vitally important in the early‐ to mid‐nineteenth century. Hiram Moore pioneered in the development of the combine, which could perform both harvesting and threshing operations, and in 1886 George S. Berry patented a steam‐powered and self‐propelled combine that could cut as much as fifty acres of wheat per day. The introduction of steam‐ and gasoline‐powered farm equipment significantly increased per‐capita productivity and laid the groundwork for the later emergence of large‐scale agribusinesses.

Following the Civil War, agriculture continued to spread. The Homestead Act, the Morrill Land Grant Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, and the creation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1862, all promoted agricultural expansion. While cotton remained king in the South, a new system of labor replaced slavery: sharecropping. Combining sharecropping and other forms of farm tenantry with a crop lien system, southern planters kept their impoverished labor force tied to the land. In the North, agricultural specialization grew apace. Dairy and truck farming (raising fruits and vegetables for urban markets) grew ever more specialized and standardized. Midwestern farms continued to flourish on a base of corn, hogs, and beef, while Wisconsin emerged as a leader in dairy products.

The greatest changes occurred on the Great Plains and beyond, where cattle and wheat produced on bonanza farms and ranches financed by eastern and foreign investment became the key commodities. With the arrival of railroads and the establishment of the first cattle town in Kansas by Joseph McCoy in 1867, the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain regions soon dominated cattle ranching. Large herds, large ranches, and large‐scale investments characterized the livestock industry's growth in the 1870s and 1880s. Absentee investors who purchased ranches in the hopes of making a quick profit soon transformed centuries‐old Spanish, Mexican, and Native American modes of livestock culture into a modern, market‐driven industry based on the labor of cowboys, who eventually became the stuff of myth and legend. But drought and harsh winters bled the profits out of the livestock industry in the late 1880s, dashing the hopes of the speculative investors. Wheat cultivation followed a similar pattern, as climatic and market changes brought failure to those who had gambled on bonanza farms. By 1900, the production of both these commodities had been reorganized and reestablished on a smaller scale.

If most of the nineteenth century was the farmer's age, the century's last twenty‐five years proved agriculture's testing time. Unfavorable terms of trade—that is, the ratio of farm products to effective demand—caused falling prices. As their income fell, farmers found it increasingly difficult to pay their mortgages, taxes, and other debts. Bankruptcies increased, farm tenancy grew, and sharecropping spread among white as well as black farmers as cultivation expanded into Texas and Oklahoma. Hence, the late nineteenth century was characterized by farmer organization and action. The Patrons of Husbandry, or the Grange, organized by Oliver Kelley in the late 1860s, soon gave rise to more politically active movements in rural America. Southern farmers' alliances under the leadership of Charles McCune, organized in the late 1870s and 1880s, allied with farm groups in the North and Middle West, led by Milton George, to form a national confederation. Never cohesive, the alliances put aside their economic and ideological differences to form the Populist party in the early 1890s. Although the Populist insurgency faded after William Jennings Bryan's unsuccessful Presidential bid in 1896, many of the political reforms sought by farmers later became law. More importantly, after 1897 the terms of trade shifted back in favor of agriculture, bring a new prosperity to farmers.
See also Canals and Waterways; Cotton Industry; Dairy Industry; Expansionism; Farmers' Alliance Movement; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Agriculture; Food and Diet; Foreign Trade, U.S..; Gilded Age; Granger Movement; Greenback Labor Party; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Land Policy, Federal; Livestock Industry; Populist Era; Roads and Turnpikes, Early; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Alan Bogue , From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century, 1963.
Gilbert C. Fite , The Farmers' Frontier, 1865–1900, 1966.
John Blassingame , The Slave Community, 1972.
David P. Szatmary , Shays' Rebellion: The Making of Agrarian Insurrection, 1980.
R. Douglas Hurt , American Farm Tools from Hand‐Power to Steam‐Power, 1982.
Howard S. Russell , A Long Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England, 1982.
Thomas Slaughter , The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution, 1986.
Terry G. Jordan , North American Cattle‐Ranching Frontiers, 1993.
R. Douglas Hurt , American Agriculture: A Brief History, 1994.

Stephanie A. Carpenter Chan

The “Golden Age” (1890s–1920) A brief era of rare prosperity and hopes fulfilled, the so‐called golden age of American agriculture was a time when most everything went right for the nation's farmers. Historians generally situate this period between the Spanish‐American War and World War I, or, more precisely, from 1909 to 1914, when strong agricultural prices translated into parity, a boost in purchasing power for farm men and women that matched or surpassed that of other economic sectors. A period characterized by optimism and modernization, it was summed up by one contemporary as an era of “corn, cattle, and contentment.” Of lasting consequence, notes R. Douglas Hurt in American Agriculture: A Brief History (1994), is the concept of parity prices and income, which soon became the basis of American agricultural policy.

What sets this “golden age” apart from other periods in American agricultural history is the absence of the hard times and agrarian discontent characteristic of other eras. After the Civil War, many farmers suffered from mortgage indebtedness, high railroad rates, and surplus production. To increase their productivity, farm men and women invested more capital in implements and machinery, such as improved plows, reapers, and threshing machines. Moreover, the movement to settle and cultivate western lands, which doubled the number of farms in the United States between 1870 and 1890, contributed significantly to the surplus crop production. As agricultural expansion outpaced consumer demand, foreign and domestic, farm prices fell.

The growing plight of farmers was lost on a larger American society in the midst of shifting from a predominantly rural agricultural basis to an urban industrial one. To resist social, economic, and political marginalization, agriculturists from the late 1860s through the 1890s formed organizations such as the Grange, the Farmers' Alliance, and the People's or Populist party. Through these, the farm sector voiced its discontent and sought economic improvement, and, ultimately, political change, all of which typified this period of agrarian revolt.

As conditions improved for the farm sector by the early twentieth century, the angry voices partially faded away. A favorable combination of factors related to crop yields, farm prices, land values, and an expanded domestic market precipitated the dawn of agriculture's golden age. Agricultural expansion slowed around 1890, as most of the new land being brought under cultivation was marginal, in need of irrigation, and not conducive to surplus crop and livestock production. As production stabilized by the late 1890s, the output of farm goods, unlike previous decades, better matched consumer demand, bringing farmers higher prices.

Land values rose, in some cases dramatically, as rising farm prices increased the demand for good land. One estimate puts the average price increase of farmland from 1900 to 1910 at between 200 and 300 percent. Industrialization and the rapid urbanization that accompanied it expanded the domestic market and consumer demand for farm goods. Chicago and Cleveland, Ohio, grew by 55 percent and 46 percent, respectively, between 1890 and 1900, while Los Angeles and Atlanta swelled by 211 percent and 72 percent, respectively, in 1900–1910. Such phenomenal urban growth, rather than foreign markets, stimulated and sustained the era of agricultural prosperity.

For farm men and women, the new prosperity manifested itself in several significant ways. A mood of optimism, propagated by the press, popular magazines, and public discourse, enlarged the sense that all was well with farmers, especially in the Middle West. References to the “new agriculture” implied that more modern methods and equipment had replaced the outmoded practices of pioneer days. Prosperity was especially apparent in the improved credit position of many farmers, who now enjoyed unequaled borrowing and purchasing power.

This enhanced purchasing power reflected the advantageous price relationship between farm goods and nonfarm goods. With nonfarm prices increasing far more slowly than farm prices, argues Gilbert C. Fite in American Farmers (1981), farmers received substantially higher prices for the goods they sold than they paid for the goods they purchased. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), later determining that the years 1909–1914 represented a time of price parity for farmers—an economic relationship in which farm goods could be exchanged for a fair amount of nonfarm goods—designated this period as the baseline for formulating future policy regarding agricultural prices.

However, the prosperity associated with the golden age of agriculture was neither ubiquitous nor synonymous with satisfaction or respect. While the Midwest seemed to bask in good times, the South experienced little of the period's well‐being. Most of that region's sharecroppers and tenant farm families lived amid abject poverty and would long continue to do so, largely because of landowners' reluctance to abandon cotton as the primary cash crop and adopt diversified agriculture. Further, despite the farm sector's overall prosperity, rural life still presented hardship with few amenities, and many young people left the family farm for the city.

This trend alarmed a group of mainly urban professionals and social reformers affiliated with the Progressive party. Their concern with the quality of rural life and the promotion of efficient farming practices formed the core of the Country Life movement. To these urban reformers, David B. Danbom contends in Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (1995), farm men and women seemed out of step with an industrialized society and thus represented a problem to be studied. Once seen as the backbone of American society, rural America and its institutions now appeared more like a backwater. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a Country Life Commission to propose ways to improve rural life and keep young people from leaving the farm. The commission's 1909 report identified substandard schools, poor roads, inadequate communication, and social isolation as significant problems in life and community leadership in farming regions.

While a number of the Country Lifers' objectives were achieved, neither the larger American society nor rural and agricultural people in general participated in the movement. Instead, rural and farm people determined their own response to the prosperity of the age. Enjoying enhanced purchasing power, they became uncharacteristically consumption oriented. Some reinvested their profits in farm operations; even more purchased items that made their homes more comfortable, modern, and pleasant, such as carpets, drapes, wallpaper, and kitchen conveniences. Farm men and women also invested in the era's new technologies and amenities, installing hand pumps as well as plumbing, electricity, and telephones when they became available. They also bought automobiles, which substantially altered patterns of rural life. Their communities benefited from the prosperity as well, as farmers paid to improve rural roads, schools, and churches, and sought rural free delivery of mail.

The prosperity and increased consumer spending during agriculture's golden age opened the door for changes on many levels. In 1920, the average farm family produced only 40 percent of what it consumed, as opposed to 60 percent twenty years earlier. Store‐bought items increasingly supplanted traditional patterns of home production. Modernization of farms and the purchase of machine technology, some historians argue, led to shifts in gender, family, and community relations. Inasmuch as the family farm was part of a complex web of community ties, modernization disrupted traditional practices of interdependence often found in rural areas.

American's entrance into World War I in 1917 marked the beginning of the end of America's golden age of agriculture. The stabilized production levels that had contributed to farmers' prosperity now seemed a problem to be overcome as the Woodrow Wilson administration concluded that successful prosecution of the war depended on America's ability to feed not only its citizens but those of its British and French allies as well. Acting under the 1917 Food Production Act and Food Control Act, Wilson named Herbert Hoover as food administrator. Slogans such as “Food will win the war” and government assistance in providing seed, fertilizer, machinery, and even capital induced farmers to produce more food. The end of the war, however, shattered the mood of optimism. In May 1920, the government ended its wartime subsidies. Agricultural exports fell as European nations recovered from the war and soon were growing enough to feed themselves. The falling farm prices that followed spelled trouble for the nation's farm sector where too many farmers had heeded the patriotic call to produce more by borrowing money to expand production. As the agricultural depression of the 1920s descended upon America's farm men and women and agrarian discontent erupted once again, the golden age of agriculture collapsed with a thud.
See also Business Cycle; Consumer Culture; Cotton Industry; Farmers' Alliance Movement; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Agriculture; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Granger Movement; Motor Vehicles; Populist Era; Progressive Era.

Bibliography

Earle D. Ross , Iowa Agriculture: An Historical Survey, 1951.
D. Jerome Tweton , The Golden Age of Agriculture: 1897–17, North Dakota History 37 (1970): 41–55.
David B. Danbom , The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930, 1979.
Gilbert C. Fite , Cotton Fields No More: Southern Agriculture, 1865–1980, 1984.
R. Douglas Hurt , Agricultural Technology in the Twentieth Century, 1991.
Mary Neth , Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900–1940, 1995.
Dorothy Schwieder , Iowa: The Middle Land, 1996.

Ginette Aley

Since 1920 In the 1920s American agriculture entered hard times economically and politically, and for the first time in the nation's history, the number of farmers and farms declined absolutely. Yet production increased dramatically thanks to mechanization, new plant strains, better grades of livestock, more scientific cultivation practices, more potent insecticides, and increased use of fertilizer. These innovations raised the costs of farming; encouraged the growth of large commercial farms; and reduced the number of small subsistence farms.

In the upper Middle West, tractor‐drawn equipment, combines, and farm trucks facilitated large wheat farming operations. Cotton remained king in the South, but continued to be grown and harvested largely by tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Tobacco, a labor‐intensive crop produced mostly in the upper South, was cultivated on small holdings with a high percentage of tenant farmers. Corn, the most universal crop, benefited from improved practices, but its harvesting was not yet fully mechanized. Increasingly, midwestern corn growers developed hog production in large‐scale operations. Irrigated citrus farming and truck farming in Florida, California, and Texas's Rio Grande valley developed rapidly in the 1920s.

Severe depression struck American agriculture in 1921 and became chronic. Largely the result of excess production, dwindling foreign demand for U.S. farm products, and rising overseas competition, the economic contraction was aggravated by inefficient and disorganized domestic marketing. Since the agricultural depression occurred amidst a booming general economy, it stimulated political protest by farmers. A group in Congress known as the farm bloc sought to enact legislation to assist farmers economically. A few modest measures were passed, but President Calvin Coolidge vetoed the major one, the McNary‐Haugen Bill.

When Herbert Hoover became President in 1929, he promised to aid agriculture. The result was the Agricultural Marketing Act, which facilitated the formation of cooperative marketing organizations for each principal commodity. This measure also provided for government‐operated stabilization corporations that could buy domestic surpluses at higher than market prices and dispose of them on the world market.

The new law coincided with the stock market crash of 1929. As the general economy plunged into depression, farm surpluses mounted alarmingly and the stabilization corporations lacked the funds to absorb them. By 1931, the Hoover administration abandoned the stabilization effort and farm prices plunged.

The Depression of the 1930s worsened the agricultural crisis, as consumers had less and less money to buy food and clothing. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, agricultural markets faced collapse. Roosevelt's advisers urgently drafted an emergency farm bill, which became the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. This sweeping measure created broad new government powers and agricultural programs. Its basic idea was to give farmers a “fair exchange value” for their products in relation to the general economy. In practice, this became known as “parity.”

This landmark law embodied several new concepts. One was domestic allotment, an attempt to limit the production of basic agricultural commodities to the quantity needed for domestic use. This approach was predicated on the belief that if commodity production fell substantially prices would rise, benefiting farmers and the entire economy.

A new government agency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), received extraordinary powers to administer the act. The domestic allotment plan mandated acreage‐reduction programs. The government offered farmers contracts whereby they received payments for reducing their planted acreage by as much as 40 percent. For perishable commodities, New Deal administrators negotiated marketing agreements among processors to raise prices to parity levels.

By 1935, the AAA had raised agricultural prices to near parity levels and saved many farmers from ruin. Opposition arose among conservatives, however, to this vast expansion of government powers. The Supreme Court in 1935 held the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional, but Congress quickly passed legislation reinstating many AAA programs, and a changed Court upheld it. In 1938 another Agricultural Adjustment Act revived many of the early programs, including price supports. In the cotton South, an unintended consequence of the New Deal's acreage‐reduction program was to displace thousands of poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Overall, however, by the end of the New Deal Era, American agriculture had regained a near‐parity position. In the process, farmers had become a protected class, insulated by the government from free‐market forces.

World War II brought global food shortages. American farmers were exhorted to produce as much as possible, and the risks of overproduction were quickly forgotten. As farmers met the challenge by growing bumper crops, farm income tripled between 1939 and 1945, far outpacing the increases in industrial wages and corporate profits. American agriculture played a vital role in the Allied victory and thereby prospered.

As farmers continued to produce at high levels after the war, the problem of surpluses predictably returned. Despite government price supports, farm income declined. The “farm problem” became a burning political question, forcing Congress to act. Agricultural legislation in 1948 and 1949 made feeble efforts to address the problem with “flexible” (lowered) price supports, but these measures had little effect. By late 1963, parity stood at 76 percent, the lowest since 1934.

With the nation plagued by agricultural surpluses, Congress in 1956 enacted a “soil bank” program that took entire farms out of production. Still later, in 1985, the Conservation Reserve Program eliminated thirty‐seven million acres of erodible land from cultivation. Yet both measures failed to decrease overall farm output, and the problems of overproduction and low prices persisted.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the focus of agriculture programs changed from eliminating surpluses to stimulating production for foreign markets. Government price supports for basic commodities encouraged farmers to produce single crops for export. In the process, diversified farming virtually disappeared. Improved technology and knowledge, much of it gained from land‐grant universities and government extension programs, increased production dramatically.

Often, farmers took the money they received for not cultivating their land and bought or leased more land to put into production. Those who were successful as agricultural entrepreneurs used government loans and subsidies to expand their operations, and above all they played the markets well. Fortunately, growing world demand for American farm products worked in their favor. As farmers put more land into cultivation, however, protests by environmental groups prompted Congress to pass laws in 1977, 1981, and 1985 denying benefits to farmers who did not comply with the conservation programs.

In the 1980s declining world markets produced great surpluses, forcing the government to lower loan and price‐support levels. Several laws, including the Farm Act of 1990, continued the trend toward world market orientation, and renewed exports after 1987 gave farmers record incomes.

Post–1920 American agriculture has also seen great demographic changes. Government programs, market forces, and the dynamics of modern life gave rise to large agribusinesses and a new farmer elite while worsening the prospects for small farmers and stimulating a dramatic rural‐to‐urban movement. From 1920 to 1995, the U.S. farm population fell from 31.5 million to 5 million. In 1990, only one in ten sons and daughters of farmers could hope to become farmers themselves.

While issues related to overproduction persisted, the nation's chronic “farm problem” gained added complexity in the late twentieth century. Dietary changes, health concerns, the rise of giant supermarket chains and fast‐food outlets, and the increased use of synthetic fabrics affected specific agricultural sectors such as the livestock and dairy industries, poultry, tobacco, and cotton. The rise of a global economy, the worldwide marketing agricultural goods, the creation of a European free‐trade zone, and the North American Free Trade Agreement all had important implications for U.S. agriculture. Controversies surrounding migratory agricultural workers, pesticide use (an issue highlighted by Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring), the environmental hazards posed by some agribusinesses, and the genetic engineering of crops and livestock raised complex policy issues. Yet late twentieth‐century American agricultural abundance made possible food stamps for low‐income families, school‐lunch programs, food for the elderly and Indian reservations, and unparalleled nutritional levels for the general populace. With its vast fertile lands and efficiencies of food production, processing, and marketing, America, as a new century dawned, faced agricultural “problems” that would delight many other nations.
See also Agricultural Education and Extension; Agricultural Experiment Stations; Cotton Industry; Depressions, Economic; Environmentalism; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Department of Agriculture; Foreign Trade, U.S.; Genetics and Genetic Engineering; Global Economy, America and the; Mass Marketing; Sharecropping and Tenantry; Tobacco Industry; Twenties, The; Urbanization.

Bibliography

A.B. Genung , A Brief Survey of 35 Years of Government Aid to Agriculture Beginning in 1920, 1960.
Edward Higbee , Farms and Farmers in an Urban Age, 1963.
Leonard Kyle , The Economics of Large Scale Crop Farming, 1970.
Gilbert C. Fite , American Farmers: The New Minority, 1981.
Hiram M. Drache , History of U.S. Agriculture and Its Relevance to Today, 1996.

David E. Conrad