How did the New Deal support farmers in the 1930s?

Learning objective – to examine how the New Deal supported farmers in the 1930s.

I can describe some of the Alphabet

Agencies designed to support farmers.

Grade D

I can explain the actions of the Alphabet Agencies in tackling the problems in farming.

Grade B

I can explain and analyse how successful the New Deal was in tackling the problems in farming.

Grade A/A*

Starter - The problems of agriculture – list the following problems in order of importance.

Lack of electricity

Low prices for farm produce

Soil erosion and flooding

Banks reclaimed farms from farmers who owed

money

What was the dust bowl?Major droughts hit many Midwestern states, such as Texas, from 1932 onwards. This, alongside poor farming techniques, led to the topsoil drying out and livestock dying. As a result, farmers could not grow crops.

Once the topsoil dried out, wind led to dust storms, called ‘Black Blizzards’, and destroyed the soil they needed to farm the land. These areas became known as ‘dust bowls’.

What was the impact of the dust bowl?The men from farming families were the first to flee the dust bowl regions, looking for work somewhere else to support their families. This growing group of migrant workers [up to 2 million men] were called ‘hobos’ and often moved from town to town looking for work often under hard conditions.

As the dust bowl got worse, whole farming families migrated to the western states, such as California, in the search for a new life. They found employment as many were willing to work for little wages, but they were resented by the locals and often forced to leave by the police.

How did the New Deal try to help farmers in the dust bowl region?

The New Deal drew up the Resettlement Administration in 1935 aiming to support farmers by buying 75 million acres for farmers who did not own their own farm or had lost land to farm.

The government targeted 450,000 farmers to be resettled. However, the dust bowl was too great a problem and only 5,000 farmers were resettled in this scheme.

Agricultural Adjustment Act [AAA]

The AAA aimed to help farmers increase their incomes. It decided to tackle the problem of low prices by forcing farmers to drop production levels by slaughtering their livestock and reducing their crops by ploughing them back into the land.

Although, this was controversial and seen as wasting produce, by 1935 farm incomes rose from $4.5 billion in 1933 to $6.9 billion.

Farm Credit Administration [FCA]

The FCA helped farmers who faced eviction from their farms because they owed money to the banks. The FCA gave low interest loans to farmers to help them pay their bank loans.

20% of farmers used the loans offered by the FCA.

Rural Electrification Administration [REA]

The REA created low interest loans to groups of farmers to provide electricity. By 1939, 250,000 farmers had electricity.

Task

This word cloud summarises the content of the story Bonus Army.

In pairs, find the 14 terms in the word cloud and using the PowerPoint and the sheet given to you, list the 14 terms and, for each term, write their relevance to how the New Deal tried to support farmers in two sentences.

Terms

PricesDust BowlBlack BlizzardsResettlementHobosMigrationProductionAAAIncomesFCALoansMortgagesElectricityREA

Plenary

Stick a copy of this visual representation of the farmers and the New Deal into your exercise book.

Beside each image write how it can contribute to answering the central question – ‘How did the New Deal support farmers?’