The Agricultural Adjustment Act

The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA)
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated president in 1933, he called Congress into special session to establish a documentation number of legislative proposals under what he called the New Deal. Also at that time, he appointed Henry Wallace as his Secretary of Agriculture. In 1933 Wallace drafted the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA).   One of the first to be introduced and passed was the Agricultural Adjustment Act in May of 1933.
The goal of the AAA was to re-establish the purchasing power of American farmers to pre-World War I ranks. It was designed to raise farm prices by buying up crops and the live stocks of farmers who limited their acreage (Paradis 36). The AAA evened out the balance of supply and demand for farm commodities so that the prices would support a straight purchasing power for farmers. This concept was known as "parity," (Shannon 122). AAA controlled the supply of seven of the basic farming crops: corn, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, tobacco, and milk by offering payments to farmers in return for farmers not planting those crops (Brinkley 764). The government would tell individual farmers how much they should produce and would later pay them subsidies for leaving some of the land idle. The tax on the food processing would lead to providing for funds for new payments.
This helped bring an increase in prices for farm commodities after 1933. The gross farm income increase half in price by the time of the first three years during the New Deal. The government declared the agricultural economy as stable and prosperous for it had increased. Although there were positive effects, there were also the negative effects. The New Deal never had the money or political power required to reach the majority of impoverished Southern tenant farmers. By the last half of the century sharecropping and tenant farming had become outmoded.
Even before the Great Depression, tenant farmers lived and worked in harsh and...