1935 - Agriculture

Agriculture

U.S. farm prices begin to rise as the Commodity Credit Corp. purchases surplus farm commodities for distribution among the needy (see 1933; AAA, 1938).

The United States has 6.81 million operating farms, down from 7.2 million in 1931.

Five Acres and Independence by Maurice Grenville Kains, 67, is a practical guide to conducting a small farm. It becomes a bestseller as thousands of urban Americans go back to the land.

Farmers on the southern plains endure a fifth year of drought and dust storms. The wind in Kansas blows night and day for 27 consecutive days without cease in April; the duststorm on April 14 is so bad that oldtimers will remember it as "Black Sunday," when visibility was reduced to zero and it appeared that the once-fertile land was becoming a desert. President Roosevelt signs a Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act into law April 27 and appoints North Carolina-born activist Hugh Hammond Bennett, 54, to head the new Soil Conservation Service (see Soil Erosion Service, 1933). Bennett says Americans are the worst stewards of the land in history and estimates that soil erosion is costing the United States $400 million in diminished productivity alone each year; he works to make Americans soil-conscious. Families lose hope and begin leaving the "dust bowl" at the rate of about 50,000 per month, most of them bound for California, and before the migration is over about 25 percent of the population will have left. The Department of Agriculture finances production of a film (The Plow That Broke the Plains) designed to teach farmers soil-conservation techniques.

A Resettlement Administration created by executive order April 30 works to move people from poor lands to better lands under the direction of administrator Rexford Guy Tugwell (see 1933).

The Frazier-Lemke Farm Bankruptcy Act of 1934 is unconstitutional, the Supreme Court rules unanimously May 27 in Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. William R. Radford. Kentucky farmer Radford mortgaged his land for $9,000 and redeemed it for $4,445. Because it permitted Radford to buy his land back on deferred payments at an interest rate of 1 percent when the going rate was 6 percent, the law takes property without compensation, the court rules, and violates the Fifth Amendment. Little use has been made of the law anyway, and the farm-mortgage situation has improved without recourse to it.

Soviet horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin dies at Michurinsk June 7 at age 79, having developed more than 300 new types of fruit trees and berries in an effort to "prove" that acquired characteristics can be inherited (see 1926). Agronomist T. D. Lysenko carries on Michurin's ideas, calling his more scientific critics "Trotskyite bandits" and enemies of the state. "Bravo, comrade Lysenko, bravo," says Josef Stalin, and Lysenkoism becomes Soviet agricultural gospel (see Vavilov, 1940).

Japan achieves self-sufficiency in wheat production for noodles, having increased domestic production by 60 percent in just 3 years.

One-third of U.S. farmers receive U.S. Treasury allotment checks for not growing food and other crops or are committed to receive such checks under terms of the AAA law of 1933, but drought holds down production more than New Deal planting restrictions do (see Supreme Court decision, 1936).

The Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) established by the Parliament at Ottawa in a law signed July 5 handles wheat exports and tells farmers how much they can plant each year with a guarantee that it will sell their crops. Headquartered at Winnipeg, Manitoba, the CWB will receive authority in 1949 to handle marketing of oats and barley as well as wheat.