Politics on Your Plate: Agricultural Policy and the American Way

Abstract

In this paper I will focus on the historical factors that have determined the direction of commercial agriculture in the United States. In order to place this history within a cultural context, I will discuss the United States agricultural policy since the early 1800s, with an emphasis on the Roosevelt Administration's New Deal farm policy and the consequent effects of such legislation on the structure of agriculture. I hope to show that current agricultural production has been guided by governmental policy with a purely economic agenda. In turn this policy influences and has been influenced by techno-scientific progress and capitalist economic philosophy. These factors working in conjunction with one another have created the contemporary farm systems.