The Problem of Long-Time Agricultural Adjustment

Before this audience, I shall not have to recount step by step our drive for agricultural adjustment to date. I take it that you are familiar with what has been done. I do want, however, to try at the outset with broad strokes, to draw the whole picture together. The main fact is that we had to get some 40 million acres of land retired from production, and that we are now in the midst of forced emergency maneuvers to that end. During the World War some 50 million acres in Europe, not counting Russia, went out of cultivation. The United States brought about 40 million more acres into cultivation and geared up its whole farm plant into a higher production. After the war we kept it up. We kept on farming as if there were still great hungry foreign markets crying for our crops. In reality, such markets were rapidly dwindling. The world owed us money; we would not accept goods in return. With our tariff wall as it was, and still is, the only way we could keep up the appearance of a great foreign custom was to lend those other nations more and more money with which to keep on taking our food and fabrics. This is what we did until about 1938. Finally we got enough to quit it; the false front of our foreign markets at once collapsed; and we had at last to face the fact that we were farming at least 40 million acres too much land.