Excerpt from County Land Use Planning

The same era that brought to many farms the benefits of automobiles, motortrucks, tractors, electricity, radio, and good roads also brought the end of free lands and a declining foreign demand for the produce of new acres. It brought the farmer face to face with problems of low income and of soil depletion and erosion. It brought the Nation face to face with the fact that land resources, wrongly managed, are exhaustible and that we have been exhausting them at a rapid rate.

Failing markets and depressed prices for farm produce impelled the individual farmer to cut costs and to produce as much as he could for as little as he could. It was hard on the farmer and hard on the land. It was hard on the rest of the Nation as well, for the farmer, receiving little for his produce, was able to buy little of what city workers produced. Both town and country suffered.

In addition to current problems, in the future hung the specter of vast regions turned into wastes by deforestation and by wind and water erosion.

No longer was the farm problem the old one of how each farmer could produce more at less cost. Congress, in a series of enactments, directed the establishment of national programs to help people on the land conserve the soil, to help farmers own their own lands, to help needy farmers make a better living, to help farmers with programs of adjustment and conservation. State legislatures acted to supplement these programs.

Agriculture had come to a point where the efforts of each individual farmer struggling to improve his own income did not add up to the greatest good for farmers as a group, nor for the Nation. As a result, farmers realized that they had to act together, in many new ways, if they were to help themselves.

Prepared by the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in cooperation with the Extension Service, the Farm Security Administration, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, United States Depart ment of Agriculture.

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