Family Farms: Extinction

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Family Farms P1 American Family Farms: Going Extinct April 19, 2011 Family Farms P2 American Family Farms: Going Extinct In early America, farming was the backbone of economic prosperity. During the times of the 13 colonies, different areas of the country had different strengths and weakness in their crops. Farmers in New England colonies had the hardest time producing crops. Their soil wasn’t good enough to grow consistently good crops and the long hard winters often killed their crops. Farmers in middle colonies prospered the most of all colonies. They had much success growing grains like wheat, barley, and oats, making them known as the “breadbasket” colonies. Farmers in Southern colonies were most known for their cash crop tobacco. They grew millions of acres of tobacco making them very prosperous. (“Farming in the 13 colonies”, N.D.) Most of those farms were family farms; in fact, all of them were family farms. Farming remained the country’s economic powerhouse up until the 1930’s when many of President Roosevelt’s new deal programs pushed many family farms out of business. FDR implemented programs such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA). The AAA controlled the supply and price of basic crops such as corn, wheat and others. They would push supply down by offering farmers a sum of money in exchange for farmers not farming a set amount of land. However, most of these payments didn’t cover the expenses the farmers gained with the lost land pushing a lot of family farms out of business. He had other programs implemented that were detrimental to family farms. Corporate farms would eventually take advantage of this as many of these programs were disastrous to family farms but beneficial to large corporate farms. (“Ganzel B.”, 2003) So where have family farms gone from the 1930’s? That’s not an easy question to answer but they have definitely

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