American agriculture in the post-World War II years underwent a massive transition from labor-based to mechanized farming and from traditional small family farms to large corporate establishments. Although the federal government sought to protect farmers from the economic risks of free enterprise, American farmers struggled throughout the postwar years for an income competitive with the national average.
While the productivity of American agriculture continually rose throughout the postwar period due to technological advances, the number of American farmers fell. In 1940, there were more than 6 million farms in the United States operated by a farmer population that exceeded 30 million. By 1973, the number of farms had declined to 2.8 million, and the farmer population had dropped by nearly 10 million. The American farm had a new face, one characterized by the presence of more tractors and fewer farmhands, by electricity, chemical fertilizers, hybrid crops and livestock, and greater size.
Between 1940 and 1970, farms increased in average size from 138 to 385 acres, as mechanization and automation increased the farmer’s staple crop production rates per acre and per man-hour. In 1940, one farm worker could supply 11 people with the agricultural products they required; by 1970, one worker was able to supply 47 people. From 1910 to 1970, tractors increased from fewer than 1,000 to 5.5 million, as horses and mules decreased from 25 million to approximately 2.4 million. Interest in the scientific aspects of farming increased, as scientists and researchers developed techniques that could increase production. Soil analysis became widely employed to determine the elements needed by a particular soil to maintain or restore its fertility. Farmers learned to combat the loss of soil by erosion with strip cropping, which involved sowing strips of dense-rooted plants to serve as water-breaks or windbreaks in fields of plants with loose-root systems, the use of cover crops which were quick-growing plants with dense root systems to bind soil, and contour plowing, in which the furrows followed the contour of the land and ran parallel to hills instead of up and down them, thus providing channels for runoff water. After the first hybrids appeared in the 1930s, research in the field of selective breeding continued, producing improved strains of both farm animals and crop plants. More farms received electrification, mail service, telephone lines, and consolidated schooling, services that were predominantly traits of urban life prior to the 1950s.
Agricultural transport also underwent changes during the postwar period. The improvement of trucks that increased their range and payloads, as well as the construction of the highway network that came as a result of the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, greatly added to the efficiency of agricultural transport. By 1967, 51 percent of foods and kindred products were transported by trucks, 47 percent by rail, and 2 percent by water. Trucks hauled most of the perishable crops, while railroads continued to transport grains and other semiperishables.
Tenant farmers or sharecroppers, historically always large providers of agricultural labor, decreased in number after 1940, largely due to the many changes resulting from the revolution in farming methods that nearly eliminated marginal farms and drastically reduced labor requirements. In the 1930s, tenant farmers made up 62 percent of the South’s farmer population and 42 percent of the farmer populations elsewhere in the United States. By 1969, the number of farms worked by tenants dropped to 11.7 percent in the South and 12.9 percent in the other farming regions. Tenant farmers either migrated to urban centers or became owners or part-owner operators. Sharecropping was lowest for livestock farming and highest in the cash-crop fields of cotton and tobacco. The primary shift in tenant farming after 1940 was toward part ownership. The number of farms in this group remained small, however, in terms of acreage operated and percentage of farm production. Part owners had become the largest group by 1969, leasing farmland mainly on a cash basis. Between 1940 and 1969, the percentage of farms owned by part owners increased from 10.1 percent to 24.6 percent.
Farmer organization during the 20th century was inconsistent compared to other labor fields, as farmers generally only organized when there was a mutual advantage to be had or the circumstances warranted it. Popular during the 1950s was the National Farmers Union, founded by Newt Gresham at Point, Texas, in 1902. Although the union first grew in the South, it gained notable strength after 1910, as it moved into the wheat-growing states of the West. By 1974, its national membership included about 250,000 farm families. Its policies were generally aimed at preserving family farms, increasing bargaining power with the federal government, and gaining special assistance for low-income farmers. Also popular during the mid-20th century was the American Farm Bureau Federation, formed in 1920 by a coalition of state representatives seeking a body of farmer representation in Congress to fight falling prices after World War I. After World War II, overproduction became a major problem, and, in 1947, the American Farm Bureau Federation began to advocate a reduction in the use of public funds to increase farm productive capacity, returning to policies that allowed prices to respond to supply and demand. By the 1970s, the American Farm Bureau Federation was the largest American farmers’ organization, with a national membership of more than 2 million families. The National Farmers Organization (NFO), however, was perhaps the most significant farmers’ organization during the postwar period. The NFO was formed in Iowa in 1955 to protest low farm prices, and within a few months it became an organization of approximately 71,000 members. The NFO sought to establish a collective bargaining system whereby farmers set prices for their produce. To accomplish this end, it initiated a system of withholding products from market until prices were met. During the 1960s, NFO membership figures were not released, but estimates vary from 115,000 to 270,000.
A persistent problem of American agriculture in the 20th century has been the tendency of farm income to fall behind increases in the costs of production. Government policies to protect farmers from the economic risks of a free enterprise system began most notably during the New Deal of the 1930s under President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a concept called parity, in which the federal government established a level for farm-product prices. When actual prices fell below that level, government would augment farmer income to ensure farmers maintained economic stability during price depressions. The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 established quotas limiting production of basic agricultural commodities. The Supreme Court found the act unconstitutional in 1936, but after several new justices were appointed to the Supreme Court, it became law again in the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, based on the same quota system. Throughout the postwar period, the act was amended several times, the basic aims being formation of a price-support program to bring farm income into balance with national income.
World War II drove farm-product prices back up, although cost of production was also up, which meant actual farmer income did not increase, and thus government parity payments remained in place. Federal costs for supporting the ongoing parity payments at a fixed rate became too expensive, as some commodities were being sold at prices much less than those paid to farmers. To reduce the government costs of maintaining farming support programs, the administration of President DwiGHT D. Eisenhower proposed that flexible, or variable, price supports replace the rigid 90 percent of parity in force. Congress enacted a bill authorizing a sliding scale of payments at 82.5 percent to 90 percent of parity on the basic commodities in 1954. Another measure in 1956 established the soil-bank program, which was designed to reduce surpluses by removing land from production. The soil-bank program authorized federal payments to farmers if they reduced production of certain crops. A subsidy plan was formulated to pay farmers for converting part of their cropland to soil-conserving uses. In practice, farmers shared the costs of planting trees or grasses, receiving annual payments that compensated them for economic loss incurred by the removal of some of their land from crop production. In 1959, Congress terminated the acreage reserve section of the soil-bank program, but left the conservation reserve program in effect until 1965, when the entire act was repealed by passage of the Food and Agriculture Act of 1965.
The Department of Agriculture in the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson during the 1960s made control of overproduction a primary goal of farm policy. Farmers were offered payments in what amounted to a rental for part of their land, which would be taken out of production the following year. At the same time, measures were implemented to expand export markets for agricultural products. During this period, the ratio of a farmer’s per capita income to that of a nonfarm person increased from about 50 percent to about 75 percent. The Food and Agriculture Act of 1965 established a long-term land-retirement policy, as well as a new four-year price-adjustment program. In 1966, the federal minimum wage was extended to farmer workers and the President’s Committee on Rural Poverty was established.
The national agricultural policy in the postwar years also included improvement of the standard of living for nonfarming Americans. Some significant legislation passed under this intent included the National School Lunch Act of 1946, a provision for food distribution to the needy in 1961, and the Food Stamp Act of 1964, an allocation of funding for the purchase of groceries for needy people. In 1967 and 1968, legislation provided food packages for expectant mothers as well as special food services for children. During the 1970s, the Department of Agriculture, through its extension service, began to expand nutrition and 4-H programs into urban areas of the nation.
Further reading: Willard W. Cochrane, The Develop-ment of American Agriculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
—Jason Reed
World History
