this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2024
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During the Great Depression the federal government literally paid farmers to not harvest crops because allowing that much food to be produced would dilute the market and bring down crop prices.
During the Great Depression.
A time when people were starving and there were virtually no forms of welfare.
When millions were thrust into poverty for reasons entirely out of their control.
The federal government paid farmers to create less food to protect profit margins.
Nowadays they largely pay for the food and give it to to people. We got gallons of eggs at one point from that.
Farmers have bills to pay, too. If the price of growing food doesn't cover the cost to make it they'll go out of business. Then there will be one less farm to grow food. If there's no farms and we're totally reliant on imports, that's a strategic weakness.
It's the same reason we prop up carmakers when they go out of business: Manufacturing capacity is a strategic asset just like farmland.
Then subsidize the farmers by the amount you were paying them to not harvest the food ? They don’t make any money when they aren’t selling it at all either, without this intervention…
Which leads to even cheaper food prices and even more subsidies, and then you have a planned economy.
Oh wait.
"During the Great Depression" could have been Hoover or Roosevelt.
It was FDR
Are you sure you aren't thinking of crop rotation? Have 4 fields, have one fallow every 4 years to recharge the soil. Keep farming without doing so causes the topsoil to blow and that caused the great dustbowl which preceded the great depression.
My grandpa was offered to be paid to let the harvested corn just rot, so it was after harvest.
It boggles my mind how little people are aware of this kind of practice. The Who even wrote a "joke" song about it in the 70s:
https://youtu.be/_VkVn0A7E6o
Well, I farmed for a year and grew a crop of corn
That stretched as far as the eye can see
That's a whole lot of cornflakes
Near enough to feed New York till 1973
Cultivation is my station and the nation
Buys my corn from me immediately
And holding sixty thousand bucks, I watch as dumper trucks
Tip New York's corn flakes in the sea
~~
Well, my pick and spade are rusty
Because I'm paid on trust
To leave my square of cornfield bare
Probably to keep from ripping up the top soil during the harvest. Kind of counterintuitive to use less farmland and to produce less when the price is high, but same thing works with oil fields - you get more the slower you pump.
How would letting harvested corn rot in piles use less farmland? Definitely keeps prices high though.
Oh, I thought you were talking about not harvesting the corn once it was ready.
If it was already harvested and then left to rot, that was market manipulation of some sort. Maybe Grangers and breaking the rail monopolies? Though I think they did the whole "left harvested food to rot" bit in the late 1800s, not early 1900s