How Did Franklin Delano Roosevelt Help US Farmers?

Farmers faced problems of low prices, overproduction, evictions, dust bowls and sharecroppers. Roosevelt set up the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and it came into being on 12th May 1933. Henry Wallace's aim (Secretary of Agriculture) in setting up the AAA was to reduce the size of farmers' crops by 'adjusting' them. The idea was that if smaller amounts of farm produce were sold at market, the price would rise, giving the farmers bigger profits.

The AAA gave farmers money to destroy their crops. The Administration also bought six million baby pigs from farmers and slaughtered them all, giving the meat in cans to the unemployed. The objective of the AAA did work because prices quickly rose, and with them rose farmers' incomes.

An Emergency Farm Mortgage Act and a Farm Credit Act made government loans available to farmers to stop them being turned off their land by banks because they couldn't repay loans. But Sharecroppers were not assisted as well as other farmers. Their condition worsened because they had nothing to do when crops had been destroyed.

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