America Paid Farmers to Destroy Food in 1933 — So How Did a Hungry Nation Eat?

In 1933, with bread lines in every American city, the federal government paid farmers to plow under more than ten million acres of cotton and to slaughter roughly six million young pigs. It sounds like madness. Yet for millions of farm families, it worked. So how did a hungry nation eat while Washington paid to destroy its food? In this documentary: • How World War I built a farm machine for a starving Europe, and why it broke in 1920 • Hoover's Federal Farm Board and the wheat mountain nobody wanted • Milo Reno, the Farmers Holiday and the judge with a rope around his neck in Le Mars, Iowa • Henry Wallace, parity and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 • The cotton plow-up, the six million pigs and the hidden processing tax in every loaf of bread • The sharecroppers who got nothing, and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union • The Dust Bowl, United States v. Butler and the ever-normal granary • Mabel McFiggin, the first food stamps, and Wickard v. Filburn Chapters: 0:00 The Summer They Plowed Under the Cotton 3:36 A Decade of Bleeding 7:17 The Judge and the Rope 11:12 Ten Million Acres 14:54 Six Million Pigs 18:57 The People Who Got Nothing 22:46 Dust and the Court 26:47 The Machine That Never Left Narration is AI-assisted. For educational and historical commentary. #EconomicHistory #History #NewDeal #GreatDepression