The Department of Agriculture

Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor. Nia Rodgers: Hey, Aughie. J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning Nia. How are you? Nia Rodgers: I'm good. How are you? J. Aughenbaugh: I'm fine; having a lovely morning and listeners. Nia Rodgers: Are the birds singing? Has the coffee been drunk? J. Aughenbaugh: Both events have occurred. Nia Rodgers: It's a good morning, isn't it? Anyway, today we're going to the next department. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, listeners. We're continuing our series on cabinet departments within the United States federal government and we are starting a new one. I think one that is near and dear to both me and Nia because we both grew up in rural America and both of us have family connections to farming and agriculture. Nia Rodgers: Yes. Truth be told, about 200 years ago, everybody had connections to farming and agriculture because 100 years ago or actually, 200 years ago when this became a thing and it wasn't quite a thing yet but when we first founding of the country, I guess is what I'm getting at, everybody was agrarian pretty much. You had some number of people, a small number of people living in cities, but really for the most part, wasn't pretty much everybody a farmer? J. Aughenbaugh: Well, I mean historically even as recently as the 1920s so about 100 years ago, nearly a quarter of all Americans had some employment that was derived from or rooted in agriculture. Nia Rodgers: Then probably a whole bunch more had gardens and I mean victory gardens which we get in World War II, where you need to raise your own food as much as you could to try to but that's not where it all begins. J. Aughenbaugh: No. In regards to the Department of Agriculture, we can't talk about this with each of the departments. Its broad mission focuses on farming, forestry, rural economic development, and since the 1960s food, and we'll talk about food in more detail in just a moment, it has a budget. In the most recent figure, I was able to get is since the midway point through the Trump Administration, it has a budget of a little over $140 billion. It's not nearly the largest, it doesn't have the largest budget of the cabinet departments by no stretch and 80 percent of that is devoted to a program that Nia and I talked about in a previous podcast episode, which is SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which used to be known as. Nia Rodgers: Food stamps. J. Aughenbaugh: Food stamps. Nia Rodgers: They were actually little stamps that you licked and attached to a thing that you gave the grocer when you paid and you got change in food stamps. There were five cent and ten cent change food stamps and the denominations of the stamps were dollar, 50 cent. I can't remember all of the denominations, but you could actually get paid back in food stamps, your change back, and then you could hoard those up. I only remember because I remember seeing them as a kid in one-cent increments that occasionally were given to me by people in my family who were users of food stamps as you can go by a penny candy and you could. You could go by a penny candy with one which I think now there's prohibitions against maybe candy. I don't know if actually they allow candy or not. J. Aughenbaugh: It is a well-regulated program and we're going to talk about that later in the episode but the SNAP program, listeners once again, I'm going to make reference to this, is an example of cooperative federalism because the federal government has created this program but they allocate the money to the states in the states using federal eligibility requirements to determine who is eligible to receive SNAP and the states actually administer the program. That's an example of cooperative federalism. Nia Rodgers: Sorry, I was looking for a number, that's why I was briefly quiet there for a moment. So Aughie told us that the agriculture budget roughly $140 billion. The defense budget in case you were wondering for a similar time period, $731.8 billion. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: One-seventh well not quite, one-sixth of the budget of defense is spent on the Department of Agriculture that gives you a measure of size of budget. When Aughie and I say 141 billion, That's hardly anything. I mean if somebody gave Aughie and I $141 billion dollars we would be delighted, happy, and dancing in the streets. It's not that we don't think that's a large amount of money for an individual but when you think of it in terms of departments and or people affected, Aughie is going to give you a phrase that was used to describe the agriculture department by Lincoln. Was it Lincoln who called it the people's department? J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Nia Rodgers: But you had in your notes and I love that, because he really was talking to the people because in his day, the people were agriculturally minded. J. Aughenbaugh: Well and also, before we get to the Lincoln quote, the reason why Nia and I mentioned the size of budgets for department, there are two points of measurement here. Nia just gave you a comparison to the Department of Defense. Nia, you and I have talked about this before, a government's budget is a statement of priorities. It's a reflection of perhaps, and this is one of the criticisms of the federal government budget, is that at times the federal government's budget priorities are out of whack. We spend more on defense than we do on agriculture but the other thing to take note of is the size of a department's budget reflects its importance politically, because that's the way departments compare themselves. It's a unit of measurement. It's like keeping up with the Joneses in your neighborhood. The Joneses have a really nice house, and three cars, and they just got a swimming pool. What do we have? We have a house that's three-quarters the size. We have a car that's frequently in the shop, and the only poll that we're familiar with is when it rains really hard, and there is a big puddle of water in our backyard but politically, that's important in regards to bureaucratic politics. Nia Rodgers: Aughie's exactly right about important. Just as a side note, I'm calling out defense but actually, treasury has larger spending and HUD. Well, sorry, it's not called HUD anymore, that tells you how old I am. Health and Human Services has more spending, but then defense and then social security and then agriculture. Our food is fifths, but if you ask somebody about their personal priorities, food is probably number 1 or number 2. It's interesting that shelter, which is HHS is number 2 in the governmental budget and food is number 5 in the governmental budget, instead of being maybe one and two. I don't know, but in capitalism, I guess it makes sense that treasury is. J. Aughenbaugh: Well, but also think about in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, food and shelter are actually two of the most basic needs you have. Before you can become a self-actualized human being, you need to be able to go ahead and feed yourself and have shelter. Okay? Nia Rodgers: Right. J. Aughenbaugh: But if you think about it in terms of the federal government budget. Nia Rodgers: Twenty six percent is treasury, 22 percent is HHS, 14 percent is defense, then we dropped to nine percent for social security, then we dropped precipitously to three percent for agriculture. Then after that it just starts to get smaller, and smaller and smaller. J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, listeners, social security is not a cabinet department and its budget is locked. Meaning none of its monies can be spent on any program other than those within social security. Nia Rodgers: Oh, that's a fair point but anyway. J. Aughenbaugh: Let's go back to the USDA, US Department of Agriculture. Now, we spend a lot of time talking about the history of how these departments arose and were created. This one has one of the most tortured histories. Nia Rodgers: Your notes, this is really interesting to me. J. Aughenbaugh: Because it was first a part of the patent office. When I came across that, I was just like, what was agriculture doing in the patent office? But it makes sense because officials in the federal government were along interested in new and improved varieties of seeds, plants and animals for import into the United States. Nia Rodgers: If you can make a seed that will survive in a certain area that wasn't surviving there before you would want to patent it because you'd want to sell it. I mean, this is long before the giant evil that is Monsanto. Monsanto, if you're listening, you're evil, there you go. That's my opinion, and you can try to sue me over it but that makes sense that it would be the commercial aspect of it first, considering, again, capitalism. Considering that the United States is built on this idea of being able to have a great idea and then profit from it in some way. J. Aughenbaugh: You develop a new idea, you get funding to manufacture it and then you sell it but again, that's one of the purposes of, in the United States Constitution, Congress having the authority to recognize patents for inventions, creations, etc. I mean, it's part and parcel of a capitalist economy. Nia Rodgers: I adore that they also allotted $1,000 to this group for the, "Collection of agricultural statistics and other agricultural purposes." I like how in every single allotment act, whatever, there is, "And other stuff as it applies." There's always a wiggle phrase that allows but what we get when we get agricultural statistics is now we have those going back to 1839. I know I'm about to sound like a complete goob, but if you ever get a chance to go back and look at the agricultural the annual statistics area, it's really interesting. It's interesting to see what crops go in and out of favor. It's interesting to see where they go in and out of favor, because if you think that fashion has trends or you think movies have trends or music has trends, so does agriculture. Like a whole bunch of people in an area, some guy will start planting soybeans and the nearby is like, "Wow, I like soybeans, that seems to work pretty well around here." Then they want to grow soybeans, and then pretty soon everybody is growing soybeans. That first guy is like, "I got to get out of soybeans because now my price has gone down." But it's an interesting or they find something that grows really well in an area and they didn't think it was going to and now it's this totally awesome thing. They also talked to you about every year about how many people are employed. J. Aughenbaugh: In the industry. Nia Rodgers: In the industry and all of those kinds of changes. Those statistics also gather things like innovations, and other stuff when you figure out crop rotation or you figure out some other something, or the makeup of the nitrogen that has to go back into the soil. All that stuff is in the agricultural statistics, and almost every depository library has them. They are also online, at least some of the years. I don't think they go back that far online. J. Aughenbaugh: No. Nia Rodgers: But they are being digitized slowly because there are libraries whose job it is to do that thing and they're working on that. J. Aughenbaugh: These statistics really do track how farming has changed in the United States in many significant ways. It really gives you an idea of the importance of technology and inventions, and making mass agriculture more of, if you will, cost efficient enterprise. Nia Rodgers: This is 1839, they're part of the patent office and everything's fine, and then 10 years later. J. Aughenbaugh: The patent office was transferred to the Department of the Interior. Nia Rodgers: Because we get a Department of Interior. We didn't have one before that. So we get a little bit of a reorganization and as we talked about in the previous episode, we get the Department of Interior, and then somebody says, "Hey, you know what belongs in the Department of Interior? All these ag people." J. Aughenbaugh: Well, then the ag people begin to make some noise about getting out of Interior. Because remember, previous podcast episode, the Department of the Interior, for an extensive period of time was the department of everything else. It was very easy for the ag folks to get lost in the Department of the Interior. Nia Rodgers: Not to put too funny point on that, but 20 percent of the land of the United States, it'd be easy for anybody to get lost. J. Aughenbaugh: To get lost, yes. According to almost every book and article I read, the person who was probably the most responsible for what eventually became the Department of Agriculture was President Abraham Lincoln. Now, before Congress gave official recognition to the Department of Agriculture, Lincoln established it through a different law that Congress passed, the Morrill Act in 1862. Some listeners may know the Morrill Act because that was the act that created land-grant universities throughout the country. Land-grant universities, basically, the way the land grant program worked was the federal government would give up some of its land, which we talked about in our most recent podcast episode. Nia Rodgers: Right. J. Aughenbaugh: Give up some of its land but the states had to promise that they would build land grant universities on that property, and the purpose of those universities was to focus on the agricultural sciences. Nia Rodgers: Modernly, they're sometimes referred to as moo use. Ag schools, or moo use. Moo being cows. There is a proud network of institutions that taught and still teach to this day very practical skills for agricultural businesses. They don't just teach the biology of agriculture, but they also teach the business of agriculture and the psychological and sociological aspects of food and food distribution. All of that goes into, AG schools. If you think that people are going to an AG school just to learn how to plant crops. That is in fact not what they are doing. They're going there to learn lots of different cool things. We love land-grant institutions around here. That's why the ultimate public university is a land grant institution. J. Aughenbaugh: For listeners, two of my degrees are from one of Virginia's land grant universities, Virginia Tech University. After about 20 years of classic interest group politics, finally in 1887, the House of Representatives and the United States Senate passed separate bills that would give cabinet status to the Department of Agriculture and Labor. When it was first graded, AG still was not a state by itself. We will look at the Department of Labor in a future episode. Nia Rodgers: Do you mind if I read the quote from the the department charge? J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, go ahead. Nia Rodgers: The department at eight employees. That's how many they had, eight employees. They were charged with research and development related to "Agricultural, rural development, aquaculture, and human nutrition in the most general and comprehensive sense of those terms." You eight people go figure out food. When anybody says the most general and comprehensive, you're like, you mean every thing? J. Aughenbaugh: Well, and think about rural development. I mean, even at that point where the United States was comprised more of rural areas than urban areas. You see this focus on rural development. I mean, this is part of the American dream myth in the United States. Is this idea that you can go to a small town, a village, and you can buy a farm, feed your family, raise a family, etc. Nia Rodgers: Modernly, you can have broad band. You can have public transportation. Rural development is still going on today and is still a hot button issue for most local governments today. Especially broadband, in the year of COVID, when kids have to stay home, they need to be able to have access to the Internet in a fast and useful way to be able to go to school. I love the name of the first appointed commissioner of the people's department. Which is what Lincoln called it. His name is? J. Aughenbaugh: Isaac Newton. Nia Rodgers: No, it's not that Isaac Newton. J. Aughenbaugh: It's not that Isaac Newton. Nia Rodgers: It's the other Isaac. J. Aughenbaugh: It's the other one. Nia Rodgers: I love that. One of these early guys always has a cool, awesome, or interesting name. J. Aughenbaugh: After Congress creates the department, again, this is classic bureaucratic politics. Then Congress started just adding stuff. For instance 1914, and this is important because Nia and I both are aware of this particular unit of the Department of Agriculture. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914, funded cooperative extension services in each state to teach, "Agriculture, home economics and other subjects to the public." Right? Nia Rodgers: Yeah. That is still true today. If you want to know how to grow tomatoes in your area, the extension office will tell you. J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Nia Rodgers: I think a lot of the extension offices are tied to university to the land grants. It's a whole network system of how do we get information out into local hands of farmers and just regular folk, in terms of home economics. I'll tell you one of the coolest things that extension services do is they hold Canon classes. They will teach people how to can the vegetables either that they buy from the store or from their own garden wherever it is that you acquire vegetables, don't steal them, but wherever it is that you buy them, they will erase them. They will teach you how to can them safely so that you can have vegetables in the winter, which trust me, in 1914 was a huge deal. If your mom didn't teach you and sorry, I'm not trying to be genderous, but it was generally your mom that taught you how to do that. If your mom didn't teach you, you needed to find somebody who would teach you. The extension offices would show you how to do stuff that come to your house and show you how to can things. J. Aughenbaugh: In a previous professional life, I used to work at Virginia Tech Richmond Center and they had extension agents at the Virginia Tech Richmond Center. They will hold classes on home gardens, economics. Balancing your budget. Nia Rodgers: Exactly. J. Aughenbaugh: Okay, budgeting. How to do your taxes. How to apply for home loans. All the kinds of stuff that when many of us become adults, society expects us to know how to do this stuff but if we weren't taught this stuff in our families, you would have agriculture extension agents or specialists who would hold classes. Nia Rodgers: Oh, yeah. Teach you how to sew. How to repair clothing. I know this is going to sound crazy to our listeners now but back in the day, you didn't have that many clothes and you actually needed to repair them. Because clothes were a lot more expensive than they are now. Now we have fast fashion and you can buy a t-shirt for $5 but back in the day, well, first of all, $5 went a lot further, but also you just didn't have that casual relationship with stuff. Can I tell you though that one of the best things that you put in here is that the early version of the Department of Agriculture was given an office. Then it was given a hunk of the mall behind the office to grow stuff. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: To have basically a test farm in the middle of Washington DC, which I love. I love the idea that you're riding downtown in your Ford Edsel or whatever it is in 1914 and then you go past a corn crop where they're testing different kinds of corn. J. Aughenbaugh: In the nation's capital. Nia Rodgers: On the mall. J. Aughenbaugh: Guys, one of the cool things about the US Department of Agriculture is, for many Americans, for years, USDA government officials were the face of government to the American population. Nia Rodgers: Right. They were the local folk who came out. J. Aughenbaugh: Because Ag extension offices at one time in our country's history were in every county, in each state. Nia Rodgers: Right. They were the federal government made real as opposed to that thing out in Washington and you think about if you're in Iowa in 1914, you're never going to see Washington. J. Aughenbaugh: No. Nia Rodgers: You're never going to go Washington, the level of time that we take away from the farm, the level of effort that it would take to get there. Most people didn't own a vehicle, now, that's just out of the question. J. Aughenbaugh: Listen, pre TV, pre radio, you may have never seen your member of congress, you may have never heard them. You may have read about them in a newspaper that was 5, 6, 7 days old. Nia Rodgers: Right. J. Aughenbaugh: But in terms of who the government was, it was your extension agent. Nia Rodgers: It was the president and your extension agent. J. Aughenbaugh: Right, okay. Nia Rodgers: Those are the two people that you could name. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: Who's in charge of the government will? President such and such and Bob. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Bob Smith, who runs the agriculture office. Nia Rodgers: He's a real nice fella. J. Aughenbaugh: He is a really nice fellow, and by the way, he's got some really interesting advice on our pepper plants. Nia Rodgers: Right. J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. Nia Rodgers: Right. J. Aughenbaugh: But the Agriculture Department played a huge role and we touched upon this before in regards to the nation's response, the federal government's response to the Great Depression. One of the core issues in the Great Depression is that many farmers initially saw the prices for their goods go down. Many farmers would grow even more crops in an attempt to go ahead and make up the loss. Nia Rodgers: Right, we have the Dust Bowl. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, because they had loans. So if the price per bushel of x crop went down, then you grew more because you needed to make enough money to pay off the loan for your property, for your equipment, et cetera, but all that did was increased supply when demand was either constant or declining. It just became this perpetuating cycle and eventually, the United States Congress gave the Department of Agriculture the authority to impose caps or limits on what farmers with each crop could grow. This becomes extremely important in helping the nation's farmers get out from underneath the Great Depression. Now, it led to some perverse behavior that Nia, you and I talked about in the infamous case of Wickard versus Filburn, where Roscoe Filburn who grew extra wheat on his farm, was fined by the Department of Agriculture because he grew too much wheat. The United States Supreme Court said that was perfectly acceptable per Congress's Commerce Clause authority. Right? Nia Rodgers: Right, and the reason he grew that wheat was not to take to market. It was to feed his own. J. Aughenbaugh: Family and his own livestock. Nia Rodgers: His own livestock, which is why it makes me so aggravated but the greater point was, that if everybody did that, it would drive the prices of wheat down and everybody would starve. All the farmers would starve. I do get where they're coming from, but I still have frustration in my heart about it. J. Aughenbaugh: The Department of Agriculture played a huge role, and I found this stat and Nia, I don't know if you noticed it in the research notes. As late as the Great Depression, farm work occupied a fourth of all Americans, one-quarter of all Americans as recently as the Great Depression. What you saw a lot with the Great Depression is that many young people who had left farms for a better life in the cities actually returned home during the 1930s because they couldn't find work in the cities. Nia Rodgers: Right but that ended up making the Dust Bowl worse in some ways because now you have more people trying to farm the land and you have a severe drought. Part of the depression, I think people don't realize was a huge series of events that all came together in a bang fashion. Because you get to depression and then you get the Dust Bowl. So you have all these pressures that whenever anybody says to me, this is the worst time we've ever had in the United States. I'm like, Oh my God, the Great Depression called and it would like you to hold its beer, please. There's some other and the civil war before that when we were killing each other brother to brother. J. Aughenbaugh: But particularly with the Great Depression in terms of agriculture, this is where you see a lot of the ''great in-migration in the United States'' where farmers from the breadbasket of the United States would go to California. Nia Rodgers: Okies. J. Aughenbaugh: The Okies, that would go to California or they would go to the big cities in the Upper Midwest or you had the reverse migration of where a lot of young people who used to go, who went to cities for new opportunities were returning home because they lost their jobs. Well, that put more economic pressure on the farms, because you had more mouths to feed. You had more workers. I mean, hey, free labor. Nia Rodgers: But there's nothing for them to grow. J. Aughenbaugh: That's right, and the Department of Agriculture had to figure out a way how to get some stability in the agricultural markets. They weren't always the most popular government officials during the 1930s because they actually had to tell people who basically have spent all their life, you can't grow. You can't do what you basically have been doing all your life. What a difficult job for government officials. Nia Rodgers: But wait, one of the positive things that they did in 1923, which they established the Bureau of Home Economics. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: Which published shopping advice and recipes to stretch family budgets and make food go further. So if you wonder why your grandma puts bread crumbs in meatloaf, it is because, in 1923, the Bureau of Home Economics said, you know what you can do with that pound of meat. You can make it go further if you put bread in it. If you put beans and bread in it, you can stretch it out and it will feed more people like that. Those are still skills that people use today to do a stretch for large families. J. Aughenbaugh: I'm going to tell you a story. My great-grandfather used to make a big pot of vegetable soup for his family. I would ask him, why did certain vegetables go into your vegetable soup? I remember him telling me that during the Great Depression, there was an ag agent who went ahead and came around to all of the families in the small town that I grew up in and said, ''Don't throw away the leftover parts of vegetables. You can put it into a soup and with a little bit of chicken broth, you can go ahead and make a big pot of chicken soup, chicken vegetable soup, chicken broth vegetable soup that will feed your family for the rest of the week.'' Because sometimes I'd be like, I'm tasting x and this. My great-grandfather would be like, well, I had a little bit of leftover blah, blah, blah when I made this. So I just went ahead and threw it in the soup. Nia Rodgers: Why are there beats in the soup? Because that's what I had left over. J. Aughenbaugh: But I remember him saying there was an ag agent, who was this like, if you want to stretch your- Nia Rodgers: Which everybody did, it didn't matter whether you still had a job or not. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, that's right. Nia Rodgers: Whether you were still doing okay or not because you could be next. That's the other thing with the depression was that people who were employed, there were waiting to be unemployed. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. There were employed one week and they would show up to work on Monday and they were told you no longer have a job. Nia Rodgers: Or no work for you this week, come back next week. The other thing which is even worse because then it's uneven. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: You might get work, you might not. So yeah, stretching. I like that there's a Bureau of Home Economics about stuff like that. Now, we have YouTube for that. We have the Internet, which will tell you how to stretch things and it's good. I'm just saying if you want to know how to stretch a recipe, there are plenty of advice columns on the Internet that will show you how to add things or stretch stuff to make it go further if you're hitting tough economic times because some people are experiencing that now. Not at that level, probably. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, but is part of the narrative of the evolution of the Department of Agriculture. Listeners, both me and I are of an age to where I don't know about you, but definitely for me, one of the electives in my high school was home economics. Nia Rodgers: Yeah, it was in my middle school. It wasn't in my high school. I don't know that they do that anymore, which I think is a little sad because I learned how to write checks, how to balance a checkbook where I had to do yours. Take your statement at the end of the month and balance everything, makes sure that everything was right. I know people probably don't do that much anymore. Then how to make a weekly food budget and how to plan meals to use something more than once so that you didn't waste anything. They also taught basic cooking skills, and they taught basic sewing skills in my class. Is that the stuff you learned? J. Aughenbaugh: That's the stuff we learned. We also learned basic food security, how to go ahead and make sure that the food you prepared was stored correctly so that when you would eat leftovers in the future, you won't get sick. Nia Rodgers: Food safety? J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Nia Rodgers: Well, that's a good idea. Just for our college listeners who may think that it's okay to leave a pizza on your dorm room table for three days and still eat it. Please don't. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Don't do that. Nia Rodgers: Don't do that. J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. Nia Rodgers: We did that and we survived but it's not a thing we would encourage you to do. J. Aughenbaugh: No. The last thing I want to mention in regards to the evolution of the Department of Agriculture is some significant changes. Once again, the presidential administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Nia Rodgers: I think he's snow globe huge parts of the government didn't. He just picked them up and shook them really hard, and put them back down to see what would happen. J. Aughenbaugh: He was always experimenting. Well, I mean, he was proud if you will, a believer in the New Deal. He thought that the government could be a positive change agent, and you see this when LBJ convinced Congress to pass the Food Stamp Act in 1964. By the way, the Food Stamp Act had a dual purpose, okay? Nia Rodgers: Yeah, it wasn't just about making sure that poor people had something to eat. J. Aughenbaugh: He was trying to go ahead, and pump up the agricultural industry. Because in many ways, LBJ was a product of the South, and historically in the United States, agriculture dominated the South, and LBJ wanted to bring the South into the 20th century. He thought one of the most effective ways was to go ahead and encourage the South to be more economically efficient, and productive, and what better way to do it than to increase the demand by giving poorer Americans an ability to do what? J. Aughenbaugh: Buy food. J. Aughenbaugh: Buy food. Nia Rodgers: That will pay farmers, that will encourage agriculture. J. Aughenbaugh: Grocers, etc. Nia Rodgers: The whole system, truck driving, all of it, the delivery mechanisms, everything but what's interesting about the Food Stamp Act is that or rather food stamps, and what modernly would be called Snapper EBT. There are things that you can't buy on that. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: There are things that are less expensive to buy on that. It encourages you to buy vegetables and encourages you to buy healthier foods under the theory that that's just better nutritionally for people but you can't buy alcohol with that, even though you can buy alcohol in a grocery store. You can't use this program to buy alcohol. It has to be food. Again, going back to what industry are you trying to goose, you're trying to use the agriculture industry. J. Aughenbaugh: Recipients of snap do complain that Big Brother is telling them what they can and cannot consume. Nia Rodgers: Right. J. Aughenbaugh: But it's the logic of many federal government programs, which is left to your own devices, you may not make good choices. So we may have to incentivize you to make better choices. Nia Rodgers: Yeah, I know you're going to talk about some controversies about Ag, and that's one of my mild controversies. I think, okay, but if an adult, like they should be able to decide what they want to do with that money. But there's also a part of me that says, no, I understand why the government doesn't let you buy alcohol with that alcohol is a luxury. For instance, snap supplemental nutritional assistance. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: It's not saying it's going to be all, but it wants to be the food part of whatever it is. I know certain sodas don't count for snap and things like that. Because corporations will happily feed you completely bankrupt non-nutritional food. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, or calories. Nia Rodgers: Foodstuffs like on the box of a well-known melty substance called cheese food? J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, cheese food. Nia Rodgers: Do they have to tell you that it's food, that that should be a warning? But I can see where that's controversial, and I know you've got another controversy you want to bring up, but that's something that I think is somewhat controversial. Also, ketchup is not a vegetable. Sometimes, there have been political machinations that have gone into it. J. Aughenbaugh: The scientists will technically say they're tomatoes. Which is the basis of most ketchups. Nia Rodgers: Is fruit. J. Aughenbaugh: Is a fruit. So, the Reagan administration in regards to the school lunches ketchup got relabeled or recategorized as a fruit and not a vegetable. Though most American consumers view tomatoes as a vegetable. Nia Rodgers: But they don't view ketchup as a vegetable, ketchup is a condiment, but it is funny to me that we're not saying that egg is without its political machinations. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. I mean, it's like any government department. Politics is going to affect the work that it does. Nia Rodgers: Right, just like what you were saying with the Food Stamp Act, really great for poor people. We're going to make sure that poor people have access to food but it's also serving capitalism in that we're going to goose all in the agricultural industry. J. Aughenbaugh: It was one of the ways LBJ was able to sell it to Congress. Nia Rodgers: He could get more conservative online with saying, you know. J. Aughenbaugh: Because there were members of Congress who had agricultural businesses who would be like, yes, you should support this, because that means we have more consumers that have money to buy our products. Nia Rodgers: Which will benefit me personally, so thank you very much. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. This is benefiting your constituency and you want to get re-elected. Nia Rodgers: There's always nuance to the government but for the most part, Ag has done an admirable job with the knowledge that they had at the time. People complain that during the Dust Bowl they didn't do more to prevent the dust bowl. Well, first of all, I don't know that the department I could prevent a drought. If they could, they would be doing that right now in the West but also, we didn't know as much about crop rotation as we do now, we didn't know as much about letting the soils rest, and planting different things in different places that we do now. I think we should give them a little bit of a break on that. Those things just hadn't been explored as much as they have now. J. Aughenbaugh: Science doesn't solve every problem. Nia Rodgers: Exactly. That's the other part of that. J. Aughenbaugh: I can be told all the time that I need to get more than six hours of sleep every night. Nia Rodgers: Tell it to the middle of the night, Peter Lori movie that you're watching. You are like no, just another hour because I loved the next set of scenes. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Last night, Turner Classic Movies had a bunch of Humphrey Bogart movies. Nia Rodgers: Oh, well, I don't know what they expected you to do besides stay up and watch. J. Aughenbaugh: Watch. I had quizzes to grade. Hey, you do the math. Nia Rodgers: Yeah, work to do and bogey in the background, he's not going to stay up. J. Aughenbaugh: Though, I'm fully aware of the fact that even at my advanced age, I'm supposed to get somewhere around 7.5-8 hours of sleep at night. Nia Rodgers: I don't know. Some people doesn't, President Trump get 3 hours of sleep a night or something. I seem to remember that Leia Coco said something about that at one point that he got 3-4 hours of sleep. J. Aughenbaugh: Science also tells us that if you're not getting a lot of sleep, you make poor decisions. Nia Rodgers: Fair point and it actually gave me both of those cases, but anyway. J. Aughenbaugh: Before we conclude the episode. I want to touch upon a few controversies because we typically do this with every cabinet department. Nia Rodgers: You're going to skip the units? J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Well, we could talk about the units. Nia Rodgers: I just like their names. Their names make me happy. They're all Aughie-sounding to me. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. We've got food production and conservation. Pretty straightforward. Rural development, which we've already discussed. Food nutrition and consumer services. Nia Rodgers: By consumer services to people who put the labels on your food. J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, yes. Nia Rodgers: The labels which are nothing but controversy which I'm sure Aughie is going to talk about in a sec, but the labels are a whole controversial issue of their own. J. Aughenbaugh: Well, and again, you want to talk about the politics. Nia Rodgers: Right. J. Aughenbaugh: Every so many years by law, the Department of Agriculture is required to go ahead and review the labels. They require manufacturers to put on food items. When they come out with the initial list, Nia, you would swear that we are proposing the Third World War. Nia Rodgers: Every interest group has so much commentary to make about the labels and the order that they should be, the order of the label and what should be bold, and whether it should be counted in grams or micrograms or whatever. I feel certain that the person whose job that is, it's like, please don't make me do this this year, please. Can we just put it off till next year? Maybe somebody else will be in the job by then. J. Aughenbaugh: I have a lateral transfer to a different unit. Nia Rodgers: I would like to be moved to anywhere else. Can I go anywhere else? Also, food safety, which is one of the other ones that you have on here. The best by day. If you want to spark drama, what you do it's like a grenade, like when you pull the pin out of a grenade and you throw it into a group of people. What you do is take a bunch of those lobbyists and throw in a can that says Best Buy, and then whatever date you want to put on it and just watch them go to town with what does that even mean and what does that? J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: Can a consumer eat it after that? Is it safe? J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Nia Rodgers: Oh, my great googly mood, please. J. Aughenbaugh: Okay. Nia Rodgers: See, people think ARC is not exciting, but it is. J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, yeah, because I recall. Nia Rodgers: It's not just watching plants grow. J. Aughenbaugh: I recall Nia the last time the consumer services unit they had drafted new regulations about labels. I recall reading a psychologist trade group. We went ahead and said that these labels are way too long because most Americans read this. Nia Rodgers: Oh, my gosh, that's sad. That makes me sad for my future. J. Aughenbaugh: But there are other units, natural resources in the environment which by the way is one of the big controversies in regards to the Department of Agriculture. Because environmental groups have complained for years that the Department of Agriculture is too connected with industry. Instead of incentivizing environmentally friendly farming practices, they continue to go ahead and support the most economic efficient agricultural practices. Nia Rodgers: Keep your cows out of rivers, except they don't make that a requirement. J. Aughenbaugh: No. Nia Rodgers: Yeah, so you get rivers that get excrement in a variety of things like that. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Nia Rodgers: Pesticides. For years, we loved the Department of Ag, but for years, even though they knew the deep was a problem, they didn't do anything about it because the agricultural industry. J. Aughenbaugh: Well, just think about farm runoff. We're recording in central Virginia, one of the closest if you will, environmentally sensitive areas is the Chesapeake Bay, and firm went off for years. Nia Rodgers: Algae blooms and killed fish. J. Aughenbaugh: Fish and etc. Nia Rodgers: Yeah. J. Aughenbaugh: But again, it's more economically efficient to basically just allow firms to produce runoff and not worry about the consequences. Nia Rodgers: Or giant pig **** pools in North Carolina? J. Aughenbaugh: Why not? Yes. Nia Rodgers: That affect groundwater. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah but you have also marketing and regulatory programs. By the way, this is also controversial. Nia Rodgers: Is it? J. Aughenbaugh: Marketing programs. The US Department of Agriculture forces certain agricultural industries to pay a surcharge so that the Department of Agriculture can mark it on their behalf, but some of the firms within those industries either don't like how the Department of Agriculture markets their industry or would prefer to go ahead and market by themselves. They don't want to pay the surcharge. J. Aughenbaugh: I'm looking at you grape growers in California. Nia Rodgers: You feel they're getting shaken down a little bit. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because they're all like, why do we have to go ahead and pay the surcharge? We don't need the marketing efforts and we don't like your marketing efforts. Let's face it, the demand from Americans to buy any grapes hasn't changed. Nia Rodgers: We don't need to pay for this. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: You're not improving our sales. J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, the last unit is extremely important in regards to foreign trade, trade and foreign agricultural affairs. Because this is one of the first units that gets consulted anytime a presidential administration negotiates a trade deal. Nia Rodgers: How is it going to hurt our farmers if we allow? J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: I assume that they are also the people who set the rules for customs so that when you bring something into the country and you say it's just kudzu, it won't be a problem. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, right. Nia Rodgers: They are like, "No, we've seen that plant before and it is a problem," or whatever. I'm assuming they set the rules for that thing as well, or at least they have some involvement in it. J. Aughenbaugh: They have a required involvement. Customs and border patrol have to consult with them before they set up any new regulations regarding the import of foodstuffs, plants, etc. Nia Rodgers: Please don't. If you're thinking, "I'm going to slip over the border to Belize and I'm going to pick a banana tree and bring it home," don't. J. Aughenbaugh: Don't. Nia Rodgers: It's just hard, but don't. J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Nia Rodgers: Do us all a favor but it strikes me that the biggest problem that the Department of Agriculture has had to deal with over the years is discrimination. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: It's farmers of color not being treated equally to white farmers. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. There have been a series of lawsuits since the 1980s, but this really became a significant legal issue in the 1990s, where a number of trade groups representing first African-American farmers, but then the lawsuits were expanded to also include Native Americans, women, and Hispanics. There were allegations that the Department of Agriculture discriminated against them in the issuance of loans. Nia Rodgers: So you know how at the beginning we were harping about the money and $141 billion? J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: A huge portion of that is in loans to farmers. What happens with farmers is, you have your piece of property and you have to borrow money to get seeds and fertilizer and water rights if you don't have water rights. You have to pay for those things ahead of getting the crop. J. Aughenbaugh: Equipment. Let's not forget equipment. Nia Rodgers: Right, and your equipment. J. Aughenbaugh: You were borrowing against the predicted or projected revenue stream. Nia Rodgers: Like loans of all kinds in the United States, home loans, business loans, persons of color have seen discrimination from the beginning of the country. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: It's been, if you are a young African-American man who wanted to start a bank, good luck, you would struggle to get a loan to do that. That's just a systemic racism problem that we've had in the United States for a long time but in this instance, we're talking billions of dollars that were selectively given to some people and not to others. It changes a lot about what you can do with farming, it changes whether you can buy more property and have a bigger farm. It's all these dynamics of farming are dependent on those first few loans to get you rolling. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Can you take a chance on an experimental crop, etc.? Again, a lot of the loan discrimination that, Nia, you just described occurred historically in the private sector but this was the federal government that was running loan programs. By the way, it wasn't just for agriculture, it was for rural development. In rural development loans in many small communities is the loan program to fund small business entrepreneurs, which a lot of Americans don't know that when they get a small business loan from their local bank, it's being either subsidized or the money is coming directly from the federal government but if the federal government has requirements that benefit one race more than another, and eventually the Supreme Court, what's the case I'm looking for? It was a class action lawsuit, Pickford v. Glickman. Nia Rodgers: Which by the way, Pickford, one of my, again, favorite names. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. That's one of the joys of us doing this series, is we come across these names and we're just like, that's a great name. Nia Rodgers: That's a great name. J. Aughenbaugh: But in 1999, the federal government settled a class action lawsuit brought by African-American farmers. The USDA agreed to a billion-dollar settlement. That wasn't enough money, Nia. The federal court that was handling the class action lawsuit determined that the federal government's liability was so much greater that 12 years later in the second round of the Pickford class action lawsuit, Congress stepped up and allocated an additional 1.25 billion. Nia Rodgers: But in actuality, that only ended up being about $250,000 per farmer. J. Aughenbaugh: Per farmer, yes. Nia Rodgers: Which if you know anything about farming, $250,000 on a big farm is nothing. J. Aughenbaugh: Nothing. Nia Rodgers: You will spend a million dollars a year putting in crops and then getting out in harvesting. J. Aughenbaugh: Harvesting, getting them to the market. Nia Rodgers: Taking to market, all that other stuff. It's an expensive business to break into if you are disadvantaged in some way. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. One last controversy, and you know how I love ironies in regards to government. Nia Rodgers: I love the government. J. Aughenbaugh: One of the greatest public health ironies in the United States in our country's history, is at the same time, certain government agencies were saying that tobacco products, particularly smoking, cause cancer. Nia Rodgers: That'd be the surgeon-general. J. Aughenbaugh: It would be the surgeon. Nia Rodgers: This causes cancer. We're going to put a label on it that says this causes cancer. USDA was doing what, Aughie? J. Aughenbaugh: Was subsidizing tobacco farming well into the late 1990s. Nia Rodgers: This is only 20 years ago, folks. J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Nia Rodgers: Even though we've known since the 70s. J. Aughenbaugh: Wait a minute. The first surgeon-general report that concluded that there was more than likely causation between tobacco and cancer was issued in the 1950s. Nia Rodgers: Yeah but I'm talking about your average person. J. Aughenbaugh: Person. Okay, fair enough. Nia Rodgers: Your average person in the mid 70s started saying and they stared taking the ads off the TV and out of magazines and they started saying, "Gosh, this is really bad for you." For another 20 years, USDA was like, "Yeah, but we'll still pay for it." You know why? Because the tobacco lobby in this nation was so incredibly strong and held a huge number of Southern senators and congressmen. J. Aughenbaugh: Well, tobacco farmers. Nia Rodgers: Powerful group of people. J. Aughenbaugh: Had some of the best lobbyists that put pressure on members of Congress, and again, this is how Congress works. You had senior members of Congress who were sharing in the House and the Senate, either agriculture committees or agricultural subcommittees that control the budget for federal agencies. Even if the Department of Agriculture wanted to get out of tobacco farming. Nia Rodgers: They weren't going to until the public tide turned enough. J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Nia Rodgers: They could get out but I agree with you. I want to mention one more thing before we go, and that is this idea that somehow the farm bills are subsidizing small farmers. They are not, they are subsidizing the evil Monsanto and all the other agribusinesses Conagra, all those other who have millions of acres of farm and are making money hand over fist and being subsidized. I am not a fan and I will straight up say that, so Conagra, feel free to see me. You won't get anything because I don't have anything, but good luck with that. But, I'm not sure that I think there should be subsidizing. Similarly, I don t think we should subsidize BP to boil out of the ground. They make plenty of money without any effort. J. Aughenbaugh: I am critical of corporate welfare. Nia Rodgers: Of all of it and this is one of those instances. J. Aughenbaugh: I have a problem when the government subsidizes behavior that the market already indicates the behavior will occur. Nia Rodgers: People are going to buy food. Turns out, people will still eat. Even if you don't subsidize the eating, they will eat. J. Aughenbaugh: If we want to encourage people to enter a market and we want to subsidize that behavior, that's fine but we already have, for instance, with agriculture, a well-developed market dominated by corporations. I'm not thinking that they're just going to go ahead and decide tomorrow, "Hey, we're no longer going to go ahead and make billions of dollars every year. We're going to shift over to a different industry." No, they're not going to stop doing that. Why are we subsidizing that stuff? That crony or corporate capitalism just drives me nuts. Because you have the government basically telling us, as taxpayers, we need to incentivize this behavior. I'm like, "No, we don't. They're already in the market. They're were already engaged in the behavior. Why are we incentivizing this behavior?" Nia Rodgers: It's not just this industry were are picking on. We are picking on all the industries where that happens. It's not just Ag and agriculture industries, there is also energy subsidies. There is car maker subsidy. Those folks aren't going to stop making cars. They don't need the airlines. There is a lot of industries where we could rethink how much they get subsidized and whether that's an acceptable use, and that's in part because arguing are both relatively conservative financially, and I think we both are like, "Wait, do you really need the subsidies?" Because if you don't, I have other places where we could use the money because I almost lost my car to a pothole in Richmond the other day, so I'm just saying. One last thing that I want to throw out here the dog has gotten his notes and I want to put it on the record for clarification. You will hear people say that there is a huge amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in the SNAP program. The percentage of that is actually very low. J. Aughenbaugh: It's one of the lowest of all federal government entitlement programs. Nia Rodgers: Does some of it happen? Of course, because guess what? Fraud? Wherever there's money, there's fraud but that's just a natural human skimming off the top thing. J. Aughenbaugh: I have five dollars in my wallet. If my daughter thought that she could go ahead and take a buck or two and have me not notice, she's going to take it and I think my daughter is generally a good kid. Nia Rodgers: But human nature prevails. We're not saying that it's perfect program, but we are saying that don't let voices tell you that it's not worthy because it is rife with fraud. It is not rife with fraud and it is a worthy program because we should make sure that everyone in this country has something to eat. That people don't go hungry at night. That's just a basic human decency that we should look after each other for and if you can come up with a better way to do it, I'm all ears. J. Aughenbaugh: But again, in the United States, unlike other Western democracies, we generally create welfare programs where we transfer money to those people and have them make decisions on how they're going to spend money. Now, if we wanted a more regulated system, we could have it. Nia Rodgers: Boxes of food that come to your house with whatever we tell you to eat. J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Do we really want to go ahead and enforce that independence limiting behavior? I'm not entirely sure that that would fly all too well in a country like the United States, that tends to put a heavy premium on liberty. Nia Rodgers: I'd rather have the waste fraud and abuse at a small level than somebody tells me what to eat because they know better than I do what's good for me. If you're given those choices, I'm purely American and then I'm like, "No, I'm going to decide that for myself." J. Aughenbaugh: Again, there are trade-offs, and we're talking about what departments do and the policies that they create. Let's take a look at the trade-offs. If we wanted to go ahead and reduce the limited amount of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Department of Agriculture's SNAP program, we probably could, but we would have to spend millions of dollars to do that. Nia Rodgers: Is the policing effort worth what you would save in the theoretical waste, fraud, and abuse. J. Aughenbaugh: Again, every reputable study that I could get my hands on as suggested. The Snap program has some of the lowest amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse of any federal government entitlement program. Because, you know what the attitude is of most Americans who receive Snap benefits is? Thank you. Nia Rodgers: Gratitude. I can feed my kids tonight. J. Aughenbaugh: I don't have to look across the kitchen table and see hunger in my children's eyes. That's gratitude and that's a good thing. Nia Rodgers: For all of its controversies and just for my personal aggravation on the label thing, which I will take to my grave, they still do good work and it's still a valuable and important agency. J. Aughenbaugh: Thinking about the label thing. Again, I'm not the brightest apple on the barrel, but I have multiple college degrees and I got to be honest with you, Nia. Nia Rodgers: Sometimes you don't understand it, do you? J. Aughenbaugh: I'm reading labels on food items I bought and I'm like, "I'm not entirely sure what this is." Nia Rodgers: Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Now, I don't know and we didn't even talk about the nutrition triangle, which is this whole episode on its own. We will do an episode on that you-all because that has changed over the years. J. Aughenbaugh: That's an example of bureaucratic politics. That the food triangle was an excellent example of bureaucratic politics. Nia Rodgers: We will talk about that in another episode. Thank you so much, Aughie. This has been wonderful. J. Aughenbaugh: Thank you, Nia. Nia Rodgers: I'll see you for the next department. J. Aughenbaugh: All right. You've been listening to civil discourse brought to you by VCU Libraries. Opinions expressed are solely the speaker's own and do not reflect the views or opinions of VCU or VCU Libraries. Special thanks to the Workshop for technical assistance. Music by Isaak Hopson. Find more information at guides.library.vcu.edu/discourse. As always, no documents were harmed in the making of this podcast.