Let's take one more look into the past and drag up the name Earl Butz. He was Richard Nixon's agriculture secretary in the 1970's, and a man who probably did more to change agriculture, and what people eat in North America, than anyone else.

Before Butz, the U.S. government played a very useful role in moderating commodity prices. When grain or oilseed crops were abundant, and prices falling, the government would buy up the surplus as a way to support farmer's incomes. If there was a shortage, these stored commodities would be released, as a way to keep prices from spiking.

Earl Butz (and others no doubt) decided to do something different. His message to U.S. farmers famously became: "I want you to plant fence post to fence post", and there was a huge incentive. The U.S. government would send a cheque in the mail to every farmer, guaranteeing a profit no matter what the market price. This led to an explosion of low cost corn and soybean., and in turn the creation of cheap soft drinks, chicken mcnuggets, and you know the rest.

The first watershed event was actually a series of events that began in the late sixties when the US government liquidated government-owned grain stocks and sold-off the round bins that held the grain. Secondly, in the early years of the seventies, a confluence of factors, including a failed anchovy harvest off the coast of Peru, and a policy change in Russia resulted in sudden, mammoth grain imports from the US which caused crop prices to sky-rocket. Having just abandoned Henry A. Wallace’s ever-normal granary policy, buffer stocks were not available to moderate prices. Finally, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, used the “bully pulpit” to convince farmers that they were in the midst of a new dawning for agriculture. He and others declared that future export demand would be “insatiable,” rendering crop surpluses a thing of the past.

The short-term doubling and even quadrupling of crop prices and, especially, the unbridled optimism for the future of crop agriculture had a number of permanent long-term effects on farm structure. Farmers came to believe that growth in grain exports was the key to a prosperous future so they geared up to grow more export crops. That meant, in many parts of the Midwest, five year rotations that included oats, bedding and hay for livestock were replaced with two year rotations of corn and soybeans. Farmers converted barns to machine sheds, tore out fences and psychologically divorced themselves from a livestock-oriented, diversified agriculture. This meant when the export boom turned out not be to be a boom at all (Uh ah, I know, it will resume anytime now), farmers had painted themselves into a corner. They could not reasonably go back to a largely livestock-based, diversified agriculture because it would be too financially and psychologically expensive to do so.

Despite the failure of the boom, farmers were assured of a bright future. Rather than view the tremendous export growth spurt as the aberration that it was, government officials, politicians, farm and commodity organization leaders, and agricultural economists saw the decline in total crop exports and the reduction of our share of exports as something that could be fixed by changing commodity policy. The revamping of farm commodity legislation began with the 1985 Farm Bill.