The History of the Farm Bill

I think it’s incredibly interesting to look at the way in which legislation can trace history. The outlines of the farm bill started in 1933, when congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act to deal with commodity surpluses that nobody had any money to buy during the Great Depression. Then a few years later came the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Acts to deal with the consequences of the Dust Bowl. In 1949, congress passed a law giving high, fixed-support prices that allowed for subsidy payments when market prices fell below certain levels. In 1964, they passed the Food Stamp Act (also known as SNAP). In 1977, SNAP was incorporated into the farm bill, which today is still being negotiated in a major way. There are huge proposed cuts to SNAP (which currently takes up roughly 80% of the Farm Bill’s budget, or 80 billion dollars a year of taxpayer’s money for 47.5 million participants), as well as issue with the placement of the program under the “Nutrition” title, despite the face that it has nothing to do with nutrition.

The Farm Bill is difficult to understand, even for professionals, but if we begin to break it down, we can use it as a window into some of the food issues that have shaped this country and those that continue to do so – we can track what were once the nation’s biggest concerns (at least in the opinion of the government), and follow that through to what preoccupies us today.

(If anyone is interested in reading more about the Farm Bill, in a relatively easy-to-understand way, www.foodpolitics.com is a really good resource.)