Agricultural Adjustment Act - History

History

Tenant farming characterized the cotton and tobacco production in the post-Civil War South. Even before the Great Depression, tenant farmers lived and worked in extremely difficult situations. As the agricultural economy plummeted in the early 1930s, tenant farmers and sharecroppers experienced the worst of it.

To accomplish its goal of parity (raising crop prices to where they were in the golden years of 1909-1914), the Act had to eliminate surplus production. It accomplished this by offering landowners acreage reduction contracts, by which they agreed not to grow cotton on a portion of their land. In return, the landowners received compensation for what they would have normally gotten from those acres. By law, they were required to pay the tenant farmers and sharecroppers on their land a portion of the money. This, however, was nearly impossible for the government to enforce. What's more, this requirement gave landlords an incentive to get rid of their tenant farmers and replace them with wage laborers. Over the remaining years of the Great Depression, the once-common practice of sharecropping and tenant farming became exceedingly rare, and vast amounts of tenant farmers were put out, without homes or means of income. Delta and Providence Cooperative Farms in Mississippi and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union were organized in the 1930s principally as a response to the hardships imposed on sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

Although the Act stimulated American agriculture, it was not without its faults. For example, it disproportionately benefited large farmers and food processors, to the disadvantage of small farmers and sharecroppers. By the last half of the century sharecropping and tenant farming had become obsolete.