Farm Policy Retrenchment, Protest, and Rural Realignment in America, 1970–2000

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Through the mid-twentieth century, the federal government maintained a commitment to American farmers that dated to the New Deal: commodity price supports, anchored to a standard called parity, that guaranteed agricultural producers a share of national purchasing power. Beginning with the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act of 1973, Congress dismantled that system in a sequence of farm bills that eliminated effective price support for wheat, corn, cotton, and rice. The rollback passed with little notice because market prices during the 1970s commodity boom sat well above the statutory floors being removed. When prices fell, the protections were gone. By 1976, crop revenues no longer covered input costs, and the debt accumulated during the boom compounded into the farm crisis that devastated rural communities across the Great Plains and Upper Midwest.

The American Agriculture Movement (AAM) mobilized in response, culminating in the February 1979 “Tractorcade” — thousands of tractors converging on Washington to demand that Congress restore parity. The effort failed. This book argues that the withdrawal of the parity system began the political transformation of rural America: not an inevitable cultural drift, but a contingent response to a federal decision to let a four-decade commitment lapse.

Chapter outline

From the New Deal to the 1970s — Rise and fracture of farm policy: the AAA, parity pricing, institutional consolidation, and early signs of stress
Collapse — The commodity shocks of the 1970s: macroeconomic context, the grain embargo, the end of Bretton Woods, and commodity price trajectories
Measuring Exposure — Who was hit, how hard? Analytical framework, data construction, and the geography of retrenchment
The Movement — Rise of the AAM: origins, organization, the Tractorcade, and the political worldview behind the parity demand
After the Protest — Fragmentation, disillusionment, and the meaning of failure four decades later
Political Consequences — County-level event study evidence linking differential retrenchment exposure to long-run partisan change
County Case Studies — What happened on the ground in the communities the numbers identify
The Tractorcade in the National Press — How media framed rural economic protest and shaped public perception of the farm crisis
Policy Withdrawal and the Realignment of Rural America — The central argument: a legible act of policy abandonment, not cultural drift, initiated the political transformation

Working paper

A working paper presenting the quantitative empirical analysis is available here.

Status

Book manuscript in progress. Sample chapters available upon request.

Book on Stephen D. O'Connell

Farm Policy Retrenchment, Protest, and Rural Realignment in America, 1970–2000

Chapter outline

Working paper

Status