A

AGRICULTURE

Agriculture underwent fundamental changes during the Great Depression because of the crushing need of farmers to find relief from severe economic hardship and their need to make adjustments to their new position in American society. American farmers had been shifting away from self-sufficiency to commercialism since the Civil War, but the speed of the process began increasing at the start of the twentieth century and particularly since World War I. In the mid 1920s the prices of commodities such as wheat and cotton slipped downward, and they fell harshly in 1930. Only with World War II did substantial improvement come. During that interval the position of the farmer as an independent yeoman changed to that of a businessman dependent on government support. This development had been steadily creeping forward for the past generation, and the farmer now had to accept this role to remain a viable part of the American economy.

In 1930 agriculture found itself facing old and unresolved problems. To begin with, farm prices were simply too low. Cotton had been 28.7 cents per pound in 1924, but hit bottom at 5.9 cents in 1931, and never rose above 12.4 cents during the Depression. Wheat followed a similar pattern, rising in price but never reaching the level it had held in some years of the previous decade. Exports, long a vital part of the commodity market, also fell dramatically, but the loss of this market had begun in the 1920s, partly because of America's new position as a global creditor after World War I. This new condition, along with the country's protective tariffs, severely hampered the ability of foreign buyers to tap the U. S. market and led to the collapse of export sales in 1930. By the 1920s, furthermore, the United States had a surplus farm population, and with their incomes falling, farm workers were underemployed. In the South and Midwest, tenant farming reached high proportions, about 40 percent by 1930, and these farmers lived in extreme poverty. Once the Depression hit, consumer demand for farm produce dropped and sent agriculture spiraling downward. Since farmers had been steadily becoming less self-sufficient and more dependent on cash flow, they fell into one of their most extreme periods of hardship.

Wretched conditions in agriculture during the Depression had severe ramifications. For one thing, the rural farm population in 1930 made up about 25 percent of the total U.S. population, but a larger percentage of Americans depended on agriculture. During the past generation urban America had become more cosmopolitan, but rural residents lacked the amenities of modern living, such as electric lighting, radios, running water, adequate health care, and education. For this segment of the population, the standard of living was below the national level, and rural educational and cultural opportunities were not keeping pace. Until farm incomes improved, the gap in lifestyles between urban and rural Americans would remain. For these reasons, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt believed that agriculture had equal importance with industry in restoring prosperity to the nation, and therein lay one of the important Depression-era changes related to agriculture.

Under the aegis of the New Deal, numerous assistance and relief programs went into operation in hopes of bringing prosperity back to agriculture. The price support programs, particularly the first, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), which started in 1933, and the second AAA of 1938, set a guaranteed minimum price under staple crops. New Dealers thought improvements in staple prices would also bring hikes in other agricultural goods. Along with the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), which offered farmers an opportunity to store their crops in government warehouses until commodity prices rose, the support programs managed to raise prices, but only modestly. On the eve of America's entry into World War II, the United States still had large surpluses, or carryovers, in cotton, corn, and wheat.

Price supports constituted only a portion of the federal assistance programs initiated during the Depression. In 1933 the Farm Credit Administration began refinancing mortgage loans at low interest. Two years later the Farm Mortgage Moratorium Act implemented a three-year moratorium against seizure of farm property, which helped debt-laden farmers refinance their farms. That same year the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) went into operation, and the Resettlement Administration (RA) undertook to furnish assistance to small farmers trying to buy land or relocate into different areas. The RA also offered assistance to tenants and sharecroppers trying to establish their own homesteads. In 1935 Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) by executive order, but Congress gave it statutory authority in 1936. The REA began a program using farmer-owned cooperatives to provide rural residents with electricity. In 1936 the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act temporarily replaced the first AAA, which had been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Later in 1937 the Farm Security Administration went into operation. It absorbed and expanded the operations of the RA by offering small landowners, tenants, and sharecroppers opportunities to buy land, refurbish their homes, and participate in rural health cooperatives.

These New Deal agencies represented a new effort to extend assistance and relief to agriculture. They offered help to all classes of farmers and landowners, large and small, and to tenants and sharecroppers. Not all the agencies survived past the New Deal, but a number of them, such as the REA, continued. What was probably the most important new concept of the Depression, the introduction of subsidized farming, became a regular feature of the American economy and continued into the twenty-first century. At the close of the Depression, agriculture relied heavily on federal supports in various forms, ending the independence of farmers as individualistic yeomen. Farming was also on the road to becoming more commercial, a practice that had begun, however, prior to the Depression.

NEW AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES

Mechanization continued to advance during the Depression, though at a much slower rate. The Cotton Belt lagged drastically behind in the use of tractors and other implements owing to the technical difficulty of developing machines to pick cotton and remove weeds in cotton fields. Southern farmers continued to rely heavily on hand labor and animal power, but there were efforts nonetheless to develop a mechanical cotton picker by the Rust brothers and International Harvester. It was not until after World War II, however, that a mechanical picker became available.

In 1937 rubber tires became available for tractors, which made them more attractive for a variety of chores and tasks other than the cultivation of crops. During the nine-year period after 1930, the number of tractors used in agriculture nearly doubled; most were general purpose tractors used in the grain belt, Corn Belt, and areas of specialized production, such as dairying and vegetable farming. Improvements in other devices like water pumps, irrigation systems, and small motors also greatly aided the farmer.

Advances in seed varieties greatly aided production. Hybrid corn replaced much of the open-pollinated varieties in the Corn Belt, and wheat that was resistant to "rust" began to be more widely cultivated during the Depression. Similar progress occurred with sugar beets, soybeans, and grain sorghum. New cotton varieties resistant to wind damage encouraged the spread of cotton on the Texas plains. And California began to expand its acreage of cotton with the development of the acala variety. Research into livestock production continued with advances in cross breeding, artificial insemination, nutritional feeds, and disease prevention. All of these advances enabled farmers to obtain greater yields and thereby increase the country's total production. As animal power declined, more land became available for food crop production rather than animal feed. By the late 1930s manpower needs were expected to drop, particularly in the southern states where advances in mechanization would soon occur.

Improvements in mechanization and technology caused farmers to have greater capital needs, shoving them into commercial operations. In order to earn profit, landowners needed to expand the size of their operations, meaning more land, larger herds of livestock, and the use of more hybrid varieties of crops. Higher production per acre and greater total volume of output became mandatory to remain a viable part of the economy.

CONCLUSION

Once war broke out in Europe in 1939 and the economy began to improve from the effects of the war, agriculture was on the threshold of entering a new era. The federal government had become a partner in farming operations. Small family farms, or "dirt farmers," faced greater difficulty surviving in the competitive economics of commercial farming, and tenants and sharecroppers began to sense the draw of city life as the United States started industrializing for the war.

The Depression had brought recognition that agriculture needed to modernize and overcome its reliance on hand labor and animal power. It was clear that small family operations would no longer provide an adequate standard of living, and if farm residents intended to keep pace in the increasingly modern and cosmopolitan world, they would have to abandon farming or operate on a commercial basis. This process had been underway prior to the Depression, of course, but the compelling hardship of the era forced this realization upon agriculture.

See Also: AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ACT; AGRICULTURAL ADJUSTMENT ADMINSTRATION (AAA); AMERICAN FARM BUREAU FEDERATION (AFBF).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Conrad, David Eugene. The Forgotten Farmers: The Story of Sharecroppers in the New Deal. 1965.

Saloutos, Theodore. The American Farmer and the New Deal. 1982.

U. S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers in a Changing World (Yearbook of Agriculture). 1940.

D. CLAYTON BROWN