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The American Agriculture Movement is an organization consisting primarily of small American farmers. It was formed in 1977 in Campo, Colorado, by a group of farmers. They attempted to organize a strike in which farmers would no longer buy or sell anything. [1]
The organization demanded for the federal government to establish higher prices of various crops and claimed to need "parity" between what they had to spend to grow crops versus revenues received from their crops. One of the slogans of the group was "Parity not Charity," as the farmers demanded for the government to ensure that they were paid more for their crops. The farmers demanded to make as much profit per acre, adjusted for inflation, as farmers did at the turn of the 20th century.
On December 10, 1977, approximately 5,000 farmers held a rally in Lincoln, Nebraska, and were joined by Nebraska Governor J. James Exon. The farmers all rode their tractors, and soon other farm states had tractor rallies. Gloria Carter Spann, a sister of President Jimmy Carter even participated in one rally.
While the farmers appeared to have widespread sympathy, relatively few farmers actually went on strike and refused to grow crops. The organization therefore decided to have a tractor rally in Washington, DC. The Carter administration agreed that the Farmers Home Administration would stop all foreclosures, but soon after the rally had ended, it resumed foreclosures of farms with past due loans.
In 1979, the farmers again drove their tractors to Washington, drove on the National Mall, and blocked traffic, which caused significant tie-ups. [2]
One of the tractors driven to Washington can be seen in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.
The American Agriculture Movement continues to lobby for changes in US farm policy. Its stated goals are as follows:
1. 100% Parity for all domestic and foreign used and/or consumer agriculture products.
2. All agricultural products produced for national or international food reserve shall be contracted at 100% parity.
3. Creation of an entity or structure composed of agriculture producers to advise and approve policies that affect agriculture.
4. Imports of agriculture products which are domestically produced must be stopped until 100% parity is reached. Thereafter, imports must be limited to the amount that the American producers cannot supply.
5. All announcements pertaining to any agricultural producing cycle shall be made far enough in advance that the producer will have adequate time to make needed adjustments in his operation
The current sitting president (2015) is Larry Matlack of Rural Burrton, Kansas.
Agricultural policy describes a set of laws relating to domestic agriculture and imports of foreign agricultural products. Governments usually implement agricultural policies with the goal of achieving a specific outcome in the domestic agricultural product markets.
Huge changes in agricultural practice were instituted under the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. 95% of all privately owned companies were nationalized, and 95% of farms were nationalized. No one could own more than 50 hectares of land. Collectivization worked for some but not others. Larger farms were organized on 3 levels of hierarchy which actually reduced worker participation in decision making. A massive trend during the early part of the collectivization period was that younger workers left for better jobs in the cities and productivity fell. Reforms in the 1970s saw more investment and improvements began to appear gradually. There were record harvests in the 1980s.
The Farmers' Alliance was an organized agrarian economic movement among American farmers that developed and flourished ca. 1875. The movement included several parallel but independent political organizations — the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union among the white farmers of the South, the National Farmers' Alliance among the white and black farmers of the Midwest and High Plains, where the Granger movement had been strong, and the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union, consisting of the African American farmers of the South.
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The Farmers' Holiday Association was a movement of Midwestern United States farmers who, during the Great Depression, endorsed the withholding of farm products from the market, in essence creating a farmers' holiday from work. The Farmers' Holiday Association was organized in May 1932 by Milo Reno. The group urged farmers to declare a "holiday" from farming, with a slogan of "Stay at Home-Buy Nothing-Sell Nothing" and "Lets call a Farmer's Holiday, a Holiday let's hold. We'll eat our wheat and ham and eggs, And let them eat their gold".
The McNary–Haugen Farm Relief Act, which never became law, was a controversial plan in the 1920s to subsidize American agriculture by raising the domestic prices of farm products. The plan was for the government to buy the wheat and then store it or export it at a loss. It was co-authored by Charles L. McNary (R-Oregon) and Gilbert N. Haugen (R-Iowa). Despite attempts in 1924, 1926, 1927, and 1931 to pass the bill, it was vetoed by President Calvin Coolidge, and not approved. It was supported by Secretary of Agriculture Henry Cantwell Wallace and Vice President Charles Dawes.
Food politics is a term which encompasses not only food policy and legislation, but all aspects of the production, control, regulation, inspection, distribution and consumption of commercially grown, and even sometimes home grown, food. The commercial aspects of food production are affected by ethical, cultural, and health concerns, as well as environmental concerns about farming and agricultural practices and retailing methods. The term also encompasses biofuels, GMO crops and pesticide use, the international food market, food aid, food security and food sovereignty, obesity, labor practices and immigrant workers, issues of water usage, animal cruelty, and climate change.
Merle Hansen was the founding president of the North American Farm Alliance and a spokesman for the plight of family farmers.
Roughly one-third of Iran's total surface area is suited for farmland, but because of poor soil and lack of adequate water distribution in many areas, most of it is not under cultivation. Only 12% of the total land area is under cultivation but less than one-third of the cultivated area is irrigated; the rest is devoted to dryland farming. Some 92 percent of agricultural products depend on water. The western and northwestern portions of the country have the most fertile soils. Iran's food security index stands at around 96 percent.
China primarily produces rice, wheat, potatoes, tomato, sorghum, peanuts, tea, millet, barley, cotton, oilseed, corn and soybeans.
George Nelson Peek was an American agricultural economist, business executive, and civil servant. He was the first administrator of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and the first president of the two banks that would become the Export-Import Bank of the United States.
For 4,000 years China has been a nation of farmers. By the time the People's Republic of China was established in 1949, virtually all arable land was under cultivation; irrigation and drainage systems constructed centuries earlier and intensive farming practices already produced relatively high yields. But little prime virgin land was available to support population growth and economic development. However, after a decline in production as a result of the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), agricultural reforms implemented in the 1980s increased yields and promised even greater future production from existing cultivated land.
The role of agriculture in the Bolivian economy in the late 1980s expanded as the collapse of the tin industry forced the country to diversify its productive and export base. Agricultural production as a share of GDP was approximately 23 percent in 1987, compared with 30 percent in 1960 and a low of just under 17 percent in 1979. The recession of the 1980s, along with unfavorable weather conditions, particularly droughts and floods, hampered output. Agriculture employed about 46 percent of the country's labor force in 1987. Most production, with the exception of coca, focused on the domestic market and self-sufficiency in food. Agricultural exports accounted for only about 15 percent of total exports in the late 1980s, depending on weather conditions and commodity prices for agricultural goods, hydrocarbons, and minerals.
Agriculture in Jordan contributed substantially to the economy at the time of Jordan's independence, but it subsequently suffered a decades-long steady decline. In the early 1950s, agriculture constituted almost 40 percent of GNP; on the eve of the Six-Day War, it was 17 percent.
Agriculture in Panama is an important sector of the Panamanian economy. Major agricultural products include bananas, cocoa beans, coffee, coconuts, timber, beef, chicken, shrimp, corn, potatoes, rice, soybeans, and sugar cane.
A farm crisis describes times of agricultural recession, low crop prices and low farm incomes. The most recent US farm crisis occurred during the 1980s.
The United States grain embargo against the Soviet Union was enacted by US President Jimmy Carter in January 1980 in response to the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It remained in effect until Ronald Reagan ended it in 1981 upon taking the office of president. American farmers felt the brunt of the sanctions, and it had a much lesser effect on the Soviet Union, which brought the validity of such embargoes into question. During the presidential election campaign of 1980, Reagan, the Republican nominee, promised to end the embargo, but Carter, the incumbent Democratic nominee, was not willing to do so.
Tractorcade was a 1978 and 1979 protest in Washington, D.C. by the American Agriculture Movement.
In 2014, a trade dispute over sugarcane arose between Mexico and the United States. In August 2014 the United States implemented a series of sugar tariffs on Mexican plantation owners in order to establish minimum prices on sugar. These tariffs were issued after U.S sugar growers criticized the United States for allowing Mexican sugar growers to flood the United States market with a much cheaper supply of sugar.
Trump administration farmer bailouts are a series of United States bailout programs introduced in 2016 during the presidency of Donald Trump as a consequence of his "America First" economic policy to help US farmers suffering due to the US-China trade war and trade disputes with European Union, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and others. China and respectively European reconcilable tariffs imposed on peanut butter, soybeans, orange juice, and other agriculture products had hit hard, especially swing states, such as Iowa, Ohio, and Wisconsin.