Title: What Are Commodity Crops and Why Do They Matter? | Hampden Park Food Cooperative | Saint Paul, MN
Headings: What Are Commodity Crops and Why Do They Matter?
What Are Commodity Crops and Why Do They Matter?
— by Lois Braun
How price supports work
Industrial ag gets involved
Politics and the Farm Bill
What's wrong with the system
A better way?
Resources
International Year of Cooperatives

Content: Participating farmers were also required to use good conservation practices as a
condition for their participation. The government also purchased and stored agricultural products in years of surplus, to take them off the market and drive prices higher, and put them back on the market in years of deficit. Food assistance programs, such as food stamps and foreign food aid, arose as methods to dispose of this surplus. ( Criticisms of this are that it creates food dependency in this country and undercuts Third World farmers.) Industrial ag gets involved
Large industrial agriculture interests never liked the fact that prices were controlled by government intervention. They wanted farmers to grow large quantities of the products they sell and move around the world, cheaply, so they pushed for the elimination of “set-asides.” They got their way in the early 1970s under President Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, who urged farmers to plant crops like corn “fencerow to fencerow” with the mantra “get big or get out.” This and other policy shifts under Secretary Butz ushered in the rise of corporate agriculture and a decline in the financial stability of the small family farm. Jump forward to 1996, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) complained that our system of supply control was contrary to their free trade rules, and when farmers (including sustainable agriculture advocates for more crop diversity) complained that the system locked them in, by forcing them to grow only those crops for which they had “base acreage” (a history of growing a given crop on a given number of acres). Politics and the Farm Bill
So the 1996 Farm Bill, dubbed “Freedom to Farm,” decoupled farm payments from the crops produced and eliminated set-asides, as part of a plan to phase out subsidies entirely by 2001.