The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

Instead of dumping corn onto a weak market (thereby weakening it further), the farmer could take out a loan from the government—using his crop as collateral—that allowed him to store his grain until prices recovered. At that point, he sold the corn and paid back the loan; if corn prices stayed low, he could elect to keep the money he’d borrowed and, in repayment, give the government his corn, which would then go into something that came to be called, rather quaintly, the “Ever-Normal Granary.” Other New Deal programs, such as those administered by the Soil Conservation Service, sought to avert overproduction (and soil erosion) by encouraging farmers to idle their most environmentally sensitive land. The system, which remained in place more or less until shortly before George Naylor came back to the farm in the 1970s, did a fairly good job of keeping corn prices from collapsing in the face of the twentieth century’s rapid gains in yield. Surpluses were held off the market by the offer of these “nonrecourse loans,” which cost the government relatively little, since most of the loans were eventually repaid. And when prices climbed, as a result of bad weather, say, the government sold corn from its granary, which helped both to pay for the farm programs and smooth out the inevitable swings in price. I say this system remained in place “more or less” until the 1970s because, beginning in the 1950s, a campaign to dismantle the New Deal farm programs took root, and with every new...