I just completed Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill by Daniel Imhoff. Actually, I completed it a week or so ago, but I finally finished typing up my notes on it. The book itself was good, but if one reads it expecting an in-depth intellectual analysis of the Farm Bill or the intersection of politics and agriculture in the United States, one would do best to look elsewhere. This book is good for stimulating curiosity, but further research into the answers to the questions it provokes is recommended. Bracketed text is taken, nearly verbatim, from the book itself.

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Where did the idea for a Farm Bill come from, anyhow?

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The early decades of the twentieth century were difficult ones for American agriculture. The land's most valuable natural resource, the soil, was blowing away at catastrophic rates, driving farmers off their land and into poverty in the cities, which were were cauldrons of civil unrest. The 1920's had brought chronic overproduction of most crops, resulting in a glutted market, prices that dipped under the cost of production and extensive land abuse. In the 1930's, the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression brought on total collapse. The farm bill emerged in 1933 as one of the cornerstone's of FDR's New Deal agenda and was administered under the Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace as a sort of centralized food policy. It was designed to address [rock bottom crop prices that came from overproduction, widespread hunger and social inequalitities, catastrophic soil loss and erosion resulting from poor land stewardship practices, lack of credit and insurance available to subsistence farmers, need for basic infrastructure in rural communities, unfair export policies prohibiting free and fair trade, and increasing civil unrest].

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more to come when I've got the time...