New Deal Podcast Eric Gardner

American agriculture is facing a crisis not seen in generations. In 1970, there were about 650,000 dairy farms in America, in 2019 there are around 40,000. Market concentration and overproduction have left once profitable farms facing hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. President Trump’s solution is to write each farm a check—for around $725. Clearly, something needs to change. Two generations ago the Agricultural Adjustment Act saved agriculture. Its principals could do so again.

In 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). The AAA utilized a land allotment plan to stabilize American farming. In other words, it paid farmers to not grow certain crops. Prior to FDR, 60% of farms had mortgaged to stay solvent and corn was routinely burned for warmth. In 1935, two years after its passage, farm income was 50 percent higher than the previous administration. The Agricultural Adjustment Act stabilized American farming after almost two decades of collapse. Unfortunately, today the AAA is mostly a footnote.

Given the extent of the agricultural collapse, farming relief was one of the first major initiatives of the New Deal. Enacting the AAA wasn’t easy. In fact, how it happened was mostly forgotten.

Until now.

The saga features a Democratic Party at war with itself, a mob threatening to cut off a judge’s penis, 200,000 slaughtered pigs, and the transformation of a life-long Republican into an icon of Progressives across the world.

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