On a dreary evening in 1977, not long after President Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, a small group of USDA officials returned from the White House after a meeting with Carter on the pending farm bill.
Asked why they had long faces, one replied, “The president checked the wrong box.”
He referred to the detailed memorandum that Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland had submitted to the president outlining options for his recommendation for the farm bill that Congress would be taking up. The memo laid out three choices – high, medium and low price and income supports for the major commodities. Bergland had recommended the middle option; Carter chose the lower option.
It was an example of a president who regularly showed minimal regard for the political implications of policymaking that Bergland explained in a lengthy oral history interview with scholars at the Miller Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia in 1986.
One example: When Bergland was under pressure from egg producers to retract dietary guidelines that warned against cholesterol in eggs, Carter told him to stand firm.
“He didn’t care what the politics of it was,” Bergland said. “If there was a matter of principle involved, Carter was tough.”
Others saw him the same way. The late Tom Foley, a Washington Democrat who later would become House speaker, once told a small group of USDA officials how to appeal to the president. Tell him that a position would reap political rewards, he said, and you’ve lost him. But urge him to take a position that is politically difficult but is the right thing to do, he’s on your side.
“He took pride in ignoring political interests—a stance that would hurt his ability to get things done in Washington, D.C.,” Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson wrote this week.
Carter’s low-option proposal minimized his influence on the farm bill in Congress, demoralized farm groups and allies who supported his 1976 campaign, helped spur the American Agriculture Movement and its “tractorcades” that snarled Washington, and gave the late Senator Bob Dole of Kansas an opening to propose “flexible parity” ideas that helped shape the legislative outcome.
Things would get so bad in 1978 that Bergland had to be evacuated from USDA headquarters after about 50 protesting farmers broke into the building, according to a Washington Post account at the time.
When Bergland presented the Carter proposal to the Senate Agriculture Committee in late March 1977, he was asked if he would have advocated it when he was a member of Congress from Minnesota.
It was not, he replied. He had a different constituency in his preceding job, but now had “a constituency of one.“
Bob Bergland“We had just elected a farmer as president,” said David Senter, a leader of the AAM protests, and his farm bill was a disappointment for many farmers.
Carter’s stance grew directly from his experience. When he eagerly adopted his description as a “peanut farmer,” which he was, in reality he was more a seed producer and processor, once serving as president of the Georgia Certified Seed Association. He also operated a peanut warehouse and a business selling fertilizer, pesticides and other farm inputs. He put his business in a blind trust during his presidency to avoid any conflict of interest.
Although he recused himself from peanut program decisions while in office, he was no fan of farm programs that intervened in supply and demand forces.
“Would you be comfortable in getting rid of some of this machinery we have in agriculture?” Carter asked Bergland during his post-election interview. “I’m talking about political machinery like peanut allotments and a lot of these old 1930s vintage New Deal regulatory authorities. … I think we ought to get rid of all we can get rid of.”
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But Carter went another way with dairy policy. He had agreed during the 1976 Wisconsin primary to support a parity-based minimum price with frequent adjustments. Confronted with a shortage and 30% inflation in the prices of dairy products, the price levels based on his campaign promise stimulated excessive production that led to an expensive oversupply of cheese.
A tractorcade carrying protesting farmers to Washington, D.C. makes its way through Bristol, Tennessee in January 1979. (AP Photo) About the same time, Carter stirred a hornet’s nest by proposing to eliminate several water resource development projects that were popular in Congress, especially for western state members."Carter's hit list had as much to do with his one-term presidency as Iran," wrote Marc Reisner, author of “Cadillac Desert,” a history of western water projects. His administration had come up with a list of 80 water projects, later whittled substantially in a bill he threatened to veto, arguing that they were environmentally damaging and costly.
Carter also proposed reform of a federal crop insurance program that was considered ineffective. Although the administration had included a proposal to have USDA county office staff become the principal crop insurance sales agents, Congress rejected the idea and enacted a system with reinsured insurance companies and independent sales agents in 1980 that continues today.
One part of USDA that did not feel the impact of Carter’s efforts to restrain spending was in the food assistance area, which then had grown to be about half of the department’s spending. His budgets proposed increases for food stamps, school feeding programs and the WIC program for pregnant women and small children.
“He believed in that,” Bergland said. “He figured it was the decent thing to do.” While USDA gave Carter cost-benefit studies supporting such programs, he added, “His instincts on these social programs were purely humanitarian.”
Carter began his final year in office by announcing an embargo of grain (and other products) to the Soviet Union in reaction to its invasion of Afghanistan. The embargo’s early support from leading agricultural figures turned to opposition by summer of 1980 when grain and soybean prices declined from pre-embargo levels and the effectiveness of the sanctions was questioned.
The embargo and its impact on the farm economy remain a bad memory in farm country to this day.
Iowa farmer Benjamin Riensche posted this observation on X Monday: “I agree with every word said about former President Jimmy Carter having a good heart. But there is a lesson here. Nice guys can make really bad ag policy. The embargo was a big part of the setup for the 1980s ag crisis.”
The embargo “has little affected Soviet food supplies and has destroyed U.S. illusions of ‘food power’," Robert L. Paarlberg, a professor of politics at Harvard and Wellesley, wrote in Foreign Affairs. He noted that Moscow had been able to replace U.S. supplies with those from elsewhere.
In the final weeks of Carter’s tenure, USDA published a “A Time to Choose: Summary Report on the Structure of Agriculture,” to mixed reviews. It chronicled the continued growth of large farms and the lack of attention to the many more small-scale, part-time operations.
“It would have been the blueprint for a second Carter term if there had been one,” Bergland said in his 1986 interview. “Instead of pumping tons of money into these big farms, which is what has happened today, there would have been a targeting” of federal benefits according to scale.
Carter continued and enhanced his humanitarian vision of food and agriculture following his presidency, founding The Carter Center in Atlanta to carry out projects worldwide to help end hunger and poverty and improve human health.
He believed that no one should go hungry in a world of abundance. In the 1980s and 1990s, when famine ravaged sub-Saharan Africa, Carter mobilized resources and promoted the political will to ensure that the crop and livestock innovations developed by the global consortium of agricultural research institutions reached the neediest.
Jim Webster was assistant secretary of agriculture for governmental and public affairs during Jimmy Carter’s administration, 1977-1981.
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