Agribusiness and corporate leaders abhorred the parity system from the beginning, decrying it as “socialism.” Government production controls, for example, made it harder for would-be monopolists to dislodge farmers who were granted more personal security, and also limited the amount of fertilizers that farmers needed to purchase from agrochemical corporations. But the continual reauthorization of the farm bill every five years gave corporate forces the ability to refashion it as a vehicle for mass industrial production.
The locus for this revolt was the Committee for Economic Development, a research organization that became the policy engine for turning the political class against New Deal policies. With ties to the Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association, the CED explicitly advocated for liquidating family farmers from the commercial landscape, to make way for industrialized mega-farms that could produce cheaper goods at scale. They christened their plan “the farm problem,” which they went about executing with such methodical precision that it would put a smile on the face of any dekulakization proponent from across the Iron Curtain.
Just as the Chicago school revolution began dismantling antitrust laws, the CED’s influence also came to a head during the 1970s. Nixon’s secretary of agriculture Earl Butz famously declared that farmers would have to “get big or get out,” urging them to plant “fencerow to fencerow,” a monoculture farming model that favors large single-crop operations over diversified family farms. Monoculture farming entails far greater use of nitrogen fertilizer to boost yields and counteract rapid soil erosion—a major cause of greenhouse gas emissions by releasing carbon from the soil.
The “get big or get out” era became the defining doctrine of U.S. ag policy for decades to come. Agribusiness succeeded at using farm bills to chip away at the supply management system. The parity payments were stripped of any requirements for conservation land set-asides, acreage restrictions, or other production controls. Payments to farmers were triggered by target prices when the market price for select commodity crops dropped below a certain level set by Congress.
This set up a vicious boom-and-bust cycle. Overproduction led to lower commodity prices and farm incomes, which in turn required greater taxpayer assistance to make up the difference. Between 1950 and 1990, over two million farmers were pushed out of the industry. But the changes lowered costs for agribusiness, and allowed them to dominate.
In the 1980s, farm markets crashed under the weight of this burden, a Soviet grain embargo, and the interest rate spike engineered by Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker to fight inflation. Farm debt exploded, and income dropped from $92.1 billion in 1973 to just $8.2 billion a decade later. Exits, bankruptcies, and foreclosures spiked, which culminated in a greater consolidation of land by corporations and financiers.