Background to the Farm Crisis

We tend to think of the current crisis faced by American farmers - in which each year farmers are forced to leave a profession and a calling that their families have often practiced for generations, sometimes on the same land - as being a recent one. But in fact American farmers have held a tenuous position in our economy even as they have fed us for over a century. This paper examines the historical and economic background of the current crisis in American farming as well as assessing how effective current steps may be to help 21st century farmers.

American farmers in the years after the Civil War found themselves facing increasingly difficult times. The farmers might well have been psychologically broken by their troubles, but they chose instead to organize - following the most important principle of populist political movements, as McCabe in his 1969 history of the Grange Movement tells us. The effective and long-lived of these political organizations developed by farmers was the Grange Movement. To the extent that farmers and rural workers were able to band together in the Depression, they borrowed on the experiences and ideals of the Grange Movement, which had sought to improve not only the economic conditions of farmers but their social status and political power as well. It began with a general sense of discontent amongst farmers who found that no amount of hard work could produce enough wealth to feed themselves - even as

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o find land that would repay a farmer for hours of labor. The catastrophe that the Dust Bowl made of so many farmers' lives was caused in part by the Great Depression (which lessened the ability of farmers to sell their crops at fair prices). The farmers would have suffered from the Great Depression alone, as did all other economic sectors of the economy. But they also had to face the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl, a disaster brought on in part by years of drought but also in part because of farming methods that were ill adapted to the ecology and soil of the Midwest. A number of poor land management practices in the Great Plains region increased the vulnerability of the area before the 1930s droughtà.Misleading information, however, was plentiful. "Boosters" of the region, hoping to promote settlement, put forth glowing but inaccurate accounts of the Great Plains' agricultural potentialà. But the earliest settlements occurred during a wet cycle, and the first crops flourished, so settlers were encouraged to continue practices that would later have to be abandoned (http://www.drought.unl.edu/whatis/dustbowl.htm). By 1937, after years of both Depression and drought, over one-fifth of all rural families living in the G
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1854
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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