In the early years of the Great Depression, US farmers faced an emergency, as the prices for their goods plummeted due to excess supply. In order to restore farmers’ purchasing power and stabilize prices, President Roosevelt passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933, which, among other things, offered incentives to farmers who did not plant basic crops.
While the AAA was successful in achieving some of its goals, its design and implementation heavily favored white farmers and landowners, while preventing many Black farmers and sharecroppers from collecting benefits they were owed. This has led historians to suggest that discrimination within the program helped drive many Black farmers out of agriculture entirely, although there have been no empirical analyses documenting the impact of the program on Black families’ economic outcomes.
Sheah Deilami-Nugent, a third year student in Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, is aiming to fill this gap in the literature by investigating how the design of the AAA impacted occupational outcomes and decisions to relocate among Black farmers. Deilami’s interest in the topic was motivated in part by a podcast episode, in which a Black farmer described his struggles in accessing credit. As she dug deeper into this history, Deilami found the AAA repeatedly cited as one of the major sources of discrimination that led to land losses for Black farmers.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act was passed in 1933 to reduce the supply of key crops – corn, cotton, milk, peanuts, rice, tobacco, and wheat – by providing direct payments to farmers who agreed to limit their production of these crops. And while there were no explicitly discriminatory elements in the language of the act itself, its implementation opened two critical doors for discrimination against Black farmers.
First, AAA payments were processed through an existing structure of county-level agricultural extension offices. Extension agents were responsible for both educating farmers on how to claim their benefits and appointing the members of the county committees – consisting of primarily wealthy, white landowners – which processed appeals and complaints from farmers. White extension agents notoriously did not work with Black farmers and sharecroppers – and, while some counties had Black extension agents, the role of Black agents was focused almost entirely on education of Black farmers, and they generally did not have the same power as white agents to appoint committee members. So Black farmers were less likely to be informed about the act and their eligibility, and were less likely to receive a fair hearing when complaints arose.
The process of distributing payments also created incentives for discrimination. Specifically, payments were made exclusively to landowners (often white), who in many cases did not pass on any benefits to sharecroppers and tenant farmers (often Black). Because the complaint process was effectively closed to Black farmers, there was little recourse for Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers to claim the benefits that they were owed.
Deilami hypothesizes that differences in the racial makeup of county-level extension offices may have led to different rates of farmers successfully receiving AAA payments. Specifically, she is exploring whether Black farmers with access to Black extension agents in their counties might have known more about the policy, and had more recourse to receive funds. To investigate this, her project is leveraging agricultural and individual-level census data, AAA spending data, and data on county extension agents and committees. Deilami is still in the process of gathering and analyzing this data – an undertaking which led her to the National Archives in Maryland earlier this year. “I have extension agent data from Louisiana, but I need it for the rest of the Southeast. I might have to go to a few more places to get that data — but it’s amazing to work with archival data, and hold documents that only a few people have held. As a graduate student, you have the privilege to work on these kinds of projects that take a longer amount of time.” Deilami’s goal is to use data on the demographics of extension agents as a source of variation that may be correlated with occupational exit and migration, in addition to long-run outcomes like wealth and income.
While previous work has examined the general effects of the AAA, Deilami’s focus on its racial impacts will contribute important new evidence on the drivers of the Great Migration and how local institutions like the AAA’s county committees can impact long-term outcomes for the people they govern. Deilami also sees her project as well-positioned to catalog the scale of damages done by discriminatory policies, as she notes “This land back in the 1900s that could’ve generated a lot of intergenerational wealth…[that opportunity] is just gone now…the damage has been done.” By contributing to the growing evidence base on the long-term harms of federal discrimination, Deilami’s project provides essential perspective on the importance of equity-oriented policy and implementation.