The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [27]
The system, which remained in place more or less until shortly before George Naylor came back to the farm in the 1970s, did a fairly good job of keeping corn prices from collapsing in the face of the twentieth century’s rapid gains in yield. Surpluses were held off the market by the offer of these “nonrecourse loans,” which cost the government relatively little, since most of the loans were eventually repaid. And when prices climbed, as a result of bad weather, say, the government sold corn from its granary, which helped both to pay for the farm programs and smooth out the inevitable swings in price.
I say this system remained in place “more or less” until the 1970s because, beginning in the 1950s, a campaign to dismantle the New Deal farm programs took root, and with every new farm bill since then another strut was removed from the structure of support. Almost from the start, the policy of supporting prices and limiting production had collected powerful enemies: exponents of laissez-faire economics, who didn’t see why farming should be treated differently than any other economic sector; food processors and grain exporters, who profited from overproduction and low crop prices; and a coalition of political and business leaders who for various reasons thought America had far too many farmers for her (or at least their) own good.
America’s farmers had long been making political trouble for Wall Street and Washington; in the words of historian Walter Karp, “since the Civil War at least, the most unruly, the most independent, the most republican of American citizens have been the small farmers.” Beginning with the populist revolt of the 1890s, farmers had made common cause with the labor movement, working together to check the power of corporations. Rising agricultural productivity handed a golden opportunity to the farmers’ traditional adversaries. Since a smaller number of farmers could now feed America, the moment had come to “rationalize” agriculture by letting the market force prices down and farmers off the land. So Wall Street and Washington sought changes in farm policies that would loose “a plague of cheap corn” (in the words of George Naylor, a man very much in the old rural-populist mold) on the nation, the effects of which are all around us—indeed, in us.
6. THE SAGE OF PURDUE
Earl “Rusty” Butz, Richard Nixon’s second secretary of agriculture, probably did more than any other single individual to orchestrate George Naylor’s plague of cheap corn. In every newspaper article about him, and there were scores, the name of Earl Butz, a blustering, highly quotable agricultural economist from Purdue University, is invariably accompanied by the epithet “colorful.” Butz’s plainspoken manner and barnyard humor persuaded many people he must be a friend to the farmer, but his presence on the board of Ralston Purina probably offered a more reliable guide to his sympathies. Though chiefly remembered outside agriculture for the racist joke that cost him his job during the 1976 election, Butz revolutionized American agriculture, helping to shift the food chain onto a foundation of cheap corn.
Butz took over the Department of Agriculture during the last period in American history that food prices climbed high enough to generate real political heat; his legacy would be to make sure that never happened again. In the fall of 1972 Russia, having suffered a series of disastrous harvests, purchased 30 million tons of American