The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [28]
The 1972 Russian grain sale and the resulting spike in farm income that fall helped Nixon nail down the farm vote for his reelection, but by the following year those prices had reverberated through the food chain, all the way to the supermarket. By 1973 the inflation rate for groceries reached an all-time high, and housewives were organizing protests at supermarkets. Farmers were killing chicks because they couldn’t afford to buy feed, and the price of beef was slipping beyond the reach of middle-class consumers. Some foods became scarce; horse meat began showing up in certain markets. “Why a Food Scare in a Land of Plenty?” was a headline in U.S. News and World Report that summer. Nixon had a consumer revolt on his hands, and he dispatched Earl Butz to quell it. The Sage of Purdue set to work reengineering the American food system, driving down prices and vastly increasing the output of American farmers. What had long been the dream of agribusiness (cheaper raw materials) and the political establishment (fewer restive farmers) now became official government policy.
Butz made no secret of his agenda: He exhorted farmers to plant their fields “fencerow to fencerow” and advised them to “get big or get out.” Bigger farms were more productive, he believed, so he pushed farmers to consolidate (“adapt or die” was another of his credos) and to regard themselves not as farmers but as “agribusinessmen.” Somewhat less noisily, Butz set to work dismantling the New Deal farm regime of price supports, a job made easier by the fact that prices at the time were so high. He abolished the Ever-Normal Granary and, with the 1973 farm bill, began replacing the New Deal system of supporting prices through loans, government grain purchases, and land idling with a new system of direct payments to farmers.
The change from loans to direct payments hardly seems momentous—either way, the government pledges to make sure the farmer receives some target price for a bushel of corn when prices are weak. But in fact paying farmers directly for the shortfall in the price of corn was revolutionary, as its proponents surely must have understood. They had removed the floor under the price of grain. Instead of keeping corn out of a falling market, as the old loan programs and federal granary had done, the new subsidies encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any price, since the government would make up the difference. Or, as it turned out, make up some of the difference, since just about every farm bill since has lowered the target price in order, it was claimed, to make American grain more competitive in world markets. (Beginning in the 1980s, big buyers of grain like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland [ADM] took a hand in shaping the farm bills, which predictably came to reflect their interests more closely than those of farmers.) Instead of supporting farmers, the government was now subsidizing every bushel of corn a farmer could grow—and American farmers pushed to go flat out could grow a hell of a lot of corn.
7. THE NAYLOR CURVE
It’s not at all clear that very many American farmers know exactly what hit them, even now. The rhetoric of competitiveness and free trade persuaded many of them that cheap corn would be their salvation, and several putative farmers’ organizations have bought into the virtues of cheap corn. But since the heyday of corn prices in the early seventies, farm income has steadily declined along with corn prices, forcing millions of farmers deeper into debt and thousands of them into bankruptcy every week. Exports, as a percentage of the American corn harvest, have barely budged from around