They include the discovery of inorganic chemical inputs, mechanization, specialization . Meanwhile, interest rates had spiked, making all of those loans farmers had taken out in the 70s into a paralyzing burden. Overall farm income jumped along with grain prices, from $2.3 billion in 1972 to $19.6 billion in '73. Earl Butz Oral History Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum 3 Butz: Oh, Nixon was warm and personal when you got to know him. 0000045725 00000 n
Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, died this weekend at 98, leaving a colorfully offensive legacy and, thanks to the political correctness of the mainstream news media, a bit of a mystery as to why he's passed with such ignominy. 0000047170 00000 n
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And the best way to become a Senator is to get on TV and demagogue the food issue.. 0000045147 00000 n
Before this incident, it was not at all unusual for respectable white people to tell and laugh at jokes that portrayed black men as lazy, shiftless, and priapic. 0000048619 00000 n
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He was Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976 under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. http://millercenter.org/president/monroe/essays/biography/8. He's on the side of people who buy from farmers and sell to consumers.. Land Ordinance of 1785. Stanford University. BJW -WYFW(.V*(T[)&(?`".\xc;; 0000029154 00000 n
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Butz was assistant secretary of agriculture from 1954 to 1957, during the Eisenhower administration. He emphasizes that the flight from the farms to the cities has slowed down during his reign; that the decrease of 11,000 farm units in 1975 is well below the annual decrease of more than 95,000 before 1969. According to this reader, Butz was not commenting onPope Paulsmoresweeping opposition to artificial contraception, which rendered his narrower opposition with regard to food shortages a foregone conclusion. Plant fence row to fence row, he exhorted from his bully pulpit. Earl Butz has, in other words, clearly become the country's most controversial Agriculture Secretary since Ezra Taft Benson, and, after his recent behindthescenes struggle with Henry Kissinger, he has probably also emerged as the most powerful in history as well. During his leadership from 1964 to 1982, Premier Leonid Brezhnev made it official Soviet policy to maintain steady growth in the livestock industry. 0000048447 00000 n
Second, Butz was an advocate of modernizing the farm; to many, this really meant doing away with the family farm and promoting bigness in agriculture. What policy did Earl Butz promote in 1973? http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Homestead.html, The Library of Congress. Changes in farming supported by government policy especially over the last century have incentivized farmers to grow crops that are easy to ship, store, and processnamely cereal grains and sweetenersensuring these foods are inexpensive and widely available. Secretary Earl Butz was the was the Secretary of Agriculture during President Nixon ' s term . Twitter, Follow us on They are disturbed, too, by the continued exchange of top personnel between the department and the big grain companies. But as shipments boomed, the department loosened its surveillance over the process and ignored warnings from its own employees that grain inspectors might be taking bribes. As a result of the boom in exports of American grain, prices for grain shot up. Increased production contributed to deforestation, higher emissions of greenhouse gases, and a greater need for fertilizer and pesticides that contaminated water sources and accumulated in the food chain. document.getElementById( "ak_js_2" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Industrial agriculture lost one of its greatest champions last week: Earl Rusty Butz, secretary of the USDA under Nixon. The deal came at the same time as the Nixon administration was trying to ease tensions between the worlds two super powers (at that time) and to bolster U.S. farm income to help win that years presidential election. Farm incomes plunged and tens of thousands of farms went under. 0000051916 00000 n
BY TAKA YAMAGUCHI In 1976, then-U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz coined the now infamous phrase, "food is a weapon.". In terms of 2009 dollars, corn reached the equivalent of over $15 in 1973.Overall farm income jumped along with grain prices, from $2.3 billion in 1972 to $19.6 billion in 73. www.ers.usda.gov/media/259572/eib3_1_.pdf, Atkin, Michael, Grain in the Global Political Economy. In, Henderson, G.C.. Notes and Memoranda: The Agricultural Credits Act of 1923., Rasmussen, Wade, Gladys Baker, and James Ward. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. [26][27], On May 22, 1981, Butz pleaded guilty to federal tax evasion charges for having under-reported income he earned in 1978. Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress, Minimum Tillage Changes Planters & Cultivators, Silent Spring & the Environmental Movement, Connections between Surface and Groundwater, Nebraska's Unique Natural Resource Districts, Insecticides DDT's Rise, Fall & Rise Again, The EPA, the Endangered Species Act & Pesticides, 14th Annual Tractor & Auto show & Summer Fair. I was speaking the language of food and they understood.. It was 50 years ago that Butz, as a teenage boy, guided a horsedrawn plow over the fields of northern Indiana. A Short History of Agricultural Adjustment, 1933-1975. National Agricultural Library Digital Collections. After forty years of regulating production to balance demand, domestic and international circumstances compelled President Richard Nixon to rethink agricultural policy. Author: Earl L. Butz The American Food Machine and Private Entrepreneurship Earl L. Butz | December 1977 The modern American Food Machine is perhaps the greatest single source of strength undergirding the unparalleled level of American living. From there, he went on to study agricultural economics, and eventually used his knowledge, along with his knack for political maneuvering and his quick wit, to forge a career that, in leading to his current post in the President's Cabinet, included serving in positions as Assistant Agriculture Secretary in the Eisenhower Administration, dean of agriculture at Purdue University and muchsoughtafter public speaker. They went heavily into debt to finance their expanded operations. 26 0 obj<>
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Butz was Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in Washington, DC, from 1954 to 1957 under President Dwight Eisenhower. Butz, who lived in West Lafayette, Ind., was 98. An Administration official who has watched Butz during such White (louse meetings says, He's very quick, which is important in the infighting, And he knows how to lose battles so he can win wars. (One early victory was his outmaneuvering Nixon Administration economic planners so as to get the farmers and their products excluded from price controls. The need for reformation has revealed no agricultural policies are sustainable for indefinite periods of time. 0000008903 00000 n
Earl Butz has devoted more than 20 years of his life in public and academic service: as an Assistant Secretary in the Eisenhower administration; as a professor and then a dean at one of the most distinguished universities . Earl Butz: Father of the Modern Food Subsidy System. Nevertheless, there has been, as Butz asserts, something of a revolution in American agriculture during his tenure. Farmstate Congressmen of both parties contend the chances are slim that farm supply and demand will remain in balance much longer and they want to cushion any drop in prices by increasing the current low Government price guarantees to farmers. Earl Butz. He also came up with a weakly worded proposal to Congress to strengthen criminal penalties and minimize conflict of interest in inspection agencies, some of which had been owned by the same grain firms whose products they inspected. The act granted settlers one hundred and sixty acres of land, which they would own outright on the condition of improvement after five years of homesteading, or could purchase at a low cost after six months. It defined settlement patterns, characterized Americas role in the global market, and navigated the country in and out of economic turmoil. Some world food organizations are concerned, not only because of American fuzziness at Rome but also because of the tendency of the United States to sign longterm supply agreements with people who pay cash for grain. First, Butz was called a disciple of Ezra Benson, who, under Eisenhower, had presided over huge grain surpluses, low farm prices and the start of the great exodus from American farms. 10.How . See more from The Dust Bowl. [29] He is buried at the Tippecanoe Memory Gardens in West Lafayette, Indiana. Harvest failures came repeatedly and were usually severe. 0000071240 00000 n
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The obituaries for Earl Butz who went to his reward Feb. 2 at the enviable age of 98all note that he will be remembered less for his accomplishments as Agriculture secretary under Presidents. On the one hand, the high production can lead to big surpluses and big drops in farm prices. A reflection on the lasting legacy of 1970s USDA Secretary Earl Butz Industrial agriculture lost one of its greatest champions last week: Earl "Rusty" Butz, secretary of the USDA under. Then they made secret deals with the five biggest American grain companies for 24.2 million tons of grain worth almost $1.5 billion in 1972 dollars $7.6 billion in 2009 dollars. Grain farmers are planting fence row to fence row, and the payments to them have nearly stopped. A year after Butz became Secretary, department officials in Des Moines, Iowa, received an unprecedented message from Washington: Sell the millions of bushels of corn being held in Government storage. Argued Nov. 7, 1977. . 0000045535 00000 n
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