Agricultural policy in the United States
The agricultural policy of the United States is composed primarily of the periodically renewed federal U.S. farm bills.
Over the first 200 years of U.S. agricultural history until the 1920s, agricultural policy in the US was dominated by policy directed at developing and supporting family farms and the inputs of the total agricultural sector, such as land, research, and human labor. Developmental policy included such legislation as the Land Act of 1820, the Homestead Act, which granted 160-acre (0.65 km2) townships, and the Morrill Act of 1862, which initiated the land-grant college system, one in a long series of acts that provided public support for agricultural research and education.
In 1933, with many farmers losing money because of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). The AAA began to regulate agricultural production by destroying crops and artificially reducing supplies. It also offered subsidies to farmers to encourage them to willingly limit their production of crops. The Supreme Court later struck down the AAA as unconstitutional, so in 1938 the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act was passed, which essentially created a similar organization for distributing farmer subsidies.
At the end of World War I, the destructive effects of the war and the surrender burdens enforced on the Central Powers of Europe bankrupted much of Europe, closing major export markets in the United States and beginning a series of events that would lead to the development of agricultural price and income support policies. United States price and income support, known otherwise as agricultural subsidy, grew out of acute farm income and financial crises, which led to widespread political beliefs that the market system was not adequately rewarding farm people for their agricultural commodities.
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